 Turing introduced his machines with the intention of providing an idealized description of a certain human activity, the tedious one of numerical computation. Until the advent of automatic computing machines, this was the occupation of many thousands of people in business, government, and research establishments. These human rote-workers were in fact called computers. Human computers used effective methods to carry out some aspects of the work nowadays done by electronic computers. The Church-Turing thesis is about computation as this term was used in 1936, viz. human computation (to read more on this, turn to the  section 3).