The Turing machine shown here consists of a special paper tape that can be erased as well as written with a "tally mark". Perhaps the TABLE is made out of a similar "read only" paper tape reader, or perhaps it reads punched cards. Turing's biographer Andrew Hodges (1983) has written that Turing as a child liked typewriters. A "'miraculous machine' -- a mechanical process which could work on Hilbert's decision problem" (Hodges p. 98) had been suggested by G. H. Hardy, one of Turing's teachers. Nevertheless, "His machine had no obvious model in anything that existed in 1936, except in general terms of the new electrical industries, with their teleprinters, television 'scanning', and automatic telephone exchange connections. It was his own invention." (Hodges p. 109)