One of the miseries of life is that everyone names everything a litte bit wrong, and so it makes everything a little harder to understand in the world than it would be if it were named differently. A computer does not primarily compute in the sense of doing arithmetic. Strange. Although they call them computers, that's not what they primarily do. They primarily are filing systems. People in the computer business say they're not really computers, they are "data handlers". All right. That's nice. Data handlers would have been a better name because it gives a better idea of the idea of a filing system.
Re:Out of the Tar Pit (2006) [pdf]
by SilasX on Wednesday March 01, 2023 @09:17AM
(#34982617)
And in the Romance languages, some variant of “ordinator”, meaning someone who orders, regulates, or arranges, closer to the tasks we actually expect of computers.
Arguably most of it!
After all, computer don't compute.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA&t=297s
One of the miseries of life is that everyone names everything a litte bit wrong, and so it makes everything a little harder to understand in the world than it would be if it were named differently. A computer does not primarily compute in the sense of doing arithmetic. Strange. Although they call them computers, that's not what they primarily do. They primarily are filing systems. People in the computer business say they're not really computers, they are "data handlers". All right. That's nice. Data handlers would have been a better name because it gives a better idea of the idea of a filing system.