In 1900, every large company had several men who spent ten hours a day, including Saturday, sitting side by side at a table doing arithmetic. The got the figures for sales that day, cash on hand that day, and all the other numbers a big business generates, and they then added, subtracted and multiplied the numbers and produced summaries and profit and loss statements.
Obviously somebody had to total up the numbers, and these were guys who did it.
They were called “computers.” Computing was their job.
So when IBM produced a machine to do all this adding and subtracting work, it was called a “computer.”
I remember when all computer courses talked about this interesting evolution of the word computer. “In the old days,” they said, “The word ‘computer’ referred to a man.”
It was a strange idea back then.
A human called a “computer” was an interesting and quaint idea in the 1950s when “computer” meant a large machine produced by IBM.
Today, the thing I am writing on here is called a “computer.” The huge IBM computers of the 1950s were entirely dedicated to computing, that is, adding and subtracting and doing statistical work with numbers.
Today I never use my computer to compute. The dia that computers once computed is every bit as quaint today as the fact that “computer” used to mean a man instead of a machine was in the 1950s.
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