@DavidNofre:

"If I am allowed to speculate, I wonder if we shouldn't look at the developments of the early 19th-century, and specially the interest on mechanical agency and language, as Mark has put in, rather as part of the longer tradition of automata construction, and particularly late 18th- century fascination with speaking automata (see, most recently: Kang's Sublime Dreams of Living Machines and Adelheid Voskuhl's Androids in the Enlightenment)."

Yes. This also brings in a discussion of analog computing which is reflected by these mechanical automata (e.g., principles of program, memory, iteration, and conditional branching in the form of a geometric discontinuity are intrinsic to these machines): http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2601391 . As to when 20th century computing theoreticians used the word “automata,” I wish I knew. -p Paul Fishwick, PhD Chair, ACM SIGSIM Distinguished University Chair of Arts & Technology and Professor of Computer Science Director, Creative Automata Laboratory The University of Texas at Dallas Arts & Technology 800 West Campbell Road, AT10 Richardson, TX 75080-3021 Home: utdallas.edu/atec/fishwick Blog: creative-automata.com