Every generation has a mythology. Every millenium has a doomsday cult.
Every legend gets the distortion knob wound up until the speaker melts.
In the beginning Turing created the Machine. And the Machine was crufty and bodacious, existing in theory only. And von Neumann looked upon the Machine, and saw that it was crufty. He divided the Machine into two Abstractions, the Data and the Code, and yet the two were one Architecture. This is a great Mystery, and the beginning of wisdom.