well, I’ve found another one dredging the lambda calculus bits of Wikipedia. behold, the Plessey System 250 article, which appears to describe a heavily fictionalized and extremely cranky version of what I’m assuming is a real (and much more boring) British military computer from the 70s:
It is an unavoidable characteristic of the von Neumann architecture[citation needed] that is founded on shared random access memory and trust in the sharing default access rights. For example, every word in every page managed by the virtual memory manager in an operating system using a memory management unit (MMU) must be trusted.[citation needed] Using a default privilege among many compiled programs allows corruption to grow without any method of error detection. However, the range of virtual addresses given to the MMU or the range of physical addresses produced by the MMU is shared undetected corruption flows across the shared memory space from one software function to another.[citation needed] PP250 removed not only virtual memory[1] or any centralized, precompiled operating system, but also the superuser, removing all default machine privileges.
It is default privileges that empower undetected malware and hacking in a computer. Instead, the pure object capability model of PP250 always requires a limited capability key to define the authority to operate. PP250 separated binary data from capability data to protect access rights, simplify the computer and speed garbage collection. The Church machine encapsulates and context limits the Turing machine by enforcing the laws of the lambda calculus. The typed digital media is program controlled by distinctly different machine instructions.
this extremely long-winded style of bullshitting (the church machine limits the Turing machine by enforcing the laws of lambda calculus? how in fuck do you propose it applies alpha or beta reduction to a fucking Turing machine?) continues on the article’s talk page, where 3 years ago a brave Wikipedian looked up the actual machine in question and poked holes in essentially every part of the article — the machine did have an OS (and a bunch of other normal computer shit the article claims it could function without), didn’t seem to implement any form of lambda calculus (or Church machine, whatever that is) on hardware, and is overall not a very interesting machine other than whatever security features it implemented for military work. the crank responsible for this nonsense then promptly flooded the Wikipedian with an incredible volume of nonsense until he went away.
e: I checked the crank’s user page and it gets so much worse
ah, further reading: these things are notable for being the first commercial computers to implement a capability system for security and seem to have been used mostly as embedded systems controlling telephone switches. the thing about them not having a superuser is vacuously true — their use case didn’t really seem to need it.