News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Ancient Computers.

Re:Ancient Computers by ggm on Monday December 05, 2022 @09:28PM (#33875120)
I sometimes get irked by the uplift of tabulators and summing devices to "computers" but then I remind myself "when computers were human" these devices were like ALU or stack internals, microcode level mechanistic support for the higher computational function.

(I have a brunsviga and a sliderule or two, as well as some abacus)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ancient Computers by Shared404 on Monday December 05, 2022 @11:44PM (#33876023)
Looks like the author feels similarly:

> If you stare at an old mechanical calculator it just sits there. It does no computing and is, therefore, not a computer. When a person starts punching the keys and turning the crank the person-device computes and is a computer. So too, an abacus is just an assembly of beads and rods or lines and pebbles, and is not a computer. But when a person uses the abacus to perform calculations, then the person-abacus is a computer.

[ Parent | on HN ]