I haven't seen the movie yet, but it's on my list. It did remind me that when I read a historical accounting and the word "computers" was listed, they meant "one who computes" and not the machine. The Navy Hydrographic Office had over 30 computers working for them during WWII in one office creating charts with hyperbolic lines.

 

I haven't seen the movie yet, but it's on my list. It did remind me that when I read a historical accounting and the word "computers" was listed, they meant "one who computes" and not the machine. The Navy Hydrographic Office had over 30 computers working for them during WWII in one office creating charts with hyperbolic lines.

I saw something decades ago (middle school, I think) that said that the suffix "-er" is normally used to mean "one who does", such as "baker" means "one who bakes" and that "-or" normally means "something that does," such as "separator" means a mechanical device the separates one thing from another.

I've long since realized that whoever wrote that didn't know what they were talking about and that both can be either and which is used depends more on the origin of the root word or whoever first coined the noun from the verb, but I always remember it because the example they claimed was that we call machines "computers" instead of "computors" because, originally, a "computer" was a person that computed things and only later did it get exclusively associated with machines that compute things instead. That was the first time I was ever aware of that bit or historical trivia and so it stuck with me.

I think the next time I encountered the use of "computer" in that context was years and years later when reading Richard Rhodes' book, "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" (absolutely excellent book, by the way) when he talked about the extensive use of computers at Los Alamos. My first thought was, "Huh? They didn't have computers back then." But that old -er vs. -or thing almost immediately popped into my mind and I wondered if it was talking about human computers. Within a page, of course, the book had explained exactly that, in addition to pointing out that a large fraction of those computers were women.

 

No sex, no blood, no news.

Worse yet, no video. A flaming hunk would have been seen everywhere.

 

I think the next time I encountered the use of "computer" in that context was years and years later when reading Richard Rhodes' book, "The Making of the Atomic Bomb"

I agree that is an excellent book. I think I read it in the 80s. At that time I was working with the PDP-8/e and if they mentioned computers, I would have thought of the ENIAC, not people. ENIAC was introduced in 1946.

 

I agree that is an excellent book. I think I read it in the 80s. At that time I was working with the PDP-8/e and if they mentioned computers, I would have thought of the ENIAC, not people. ENIAC was introduced in 1946.

That's about the time frame that I read it -- it was while I was still an undergrad and I graduated in '91. I knew it couldn't be the ENIAC since, as you say, that was developed just after WWII. I didn't know about the Colossus at that time, otherwise I would have wondered if they had replicated it from the Brits and used it at Los Alamos. I wonder if the Colossus would even have been suitable for what they needed, since it was developed for code breaking.