The first virtual machine (an *(abstract VM)) successfully designed to embody universal computations is the Turing Machine.

The principle of (Universal) Turing Machines, _(aka) (U)TMs, is described (often with variations) in any book on the principles of Computing Theory.

<ul class="links">
<li>_("On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem"|http://www.turingarchive.org/browse.php/B/12) Turing's seminal 1936 article (_("old link"|http://www.abelard.org/turpap2/turpap2.htm)) from _("The Turing Digital Archive"|http://www.turingarchive.org/).
<li>_("Alan Turing"|http://www.turing.org.uk/) web site, maintained by Andrew Hodges.
<li>_("Busy Beaver Turing Machine" | http://grail.cba.csuohio.edu/~somos/bb.html).
</ul>

<ul class="links">
<li>_("Computers Are Not Turing Machines"|http://humane.sourceforge.net/unpublished/turing_machines.html) by _(Jef Raskin).
<li>_("Peter Wegner"|http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/pw/) and his work on <em>Interactions</em>: his thesis is that a UTM augmented with <em>Interactions</em> is more powerful than a bare UTM (similar to the argument of _(Jef Raskin)).
<li>_("Peter Rittgen"|http://www.adm.hb.se/personal/pri/) notes on Wegner work (for example, his _("Why Church's Thesis Still Holds - Some Notes on Peter Wegner's Tracts on Interaction and Computability"|http://www.adm.hb.se/personal/pri/cj98.pdf) (._(pdf))).
<li>_("Damjan Bojadziev"|http://nl.ijs.si/~damjan/me.html) again on Wegner work with the paper _("A note on interaction and incompleteness"|http://nl.ijs.si/~damjan/wegner.pdf) (._(pdf)) and the slides _("Why Interaction Is Not More Powerful Than Algorithms"|http://nl.ijs.si/~damjan/wegner.html).
</ul>
