“Computer was a job title before it was a machine. The women who calculated artillery trajectories at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1940s were called 'computers.' The machine that replaced them inherited their name.”
Latin computare means 'to reckon together,' from com- ('together') + putare ('to reckon, to prune, to settle'). The word entered English in the 1610s as 'computer,' meaning a person who computes — someone who performs mathematical calculations. For over three centuries, every computer was human. The job title appeared in astronomy, navigation, insurance, and military ballistics.
During World War II, the term gained specific urgency. At the University of Pennsylvania, a team of six women — Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Meltzer, Fran Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman — worked as human computers calculating artillery firing tables. In 1945, they were assigned to program ENIAC, one of the first electronic general-purpose computers. The machine took the name of the people it was built to replace.
At Bletchley Park in England, human computers had been working alongside early electronic machines since 1943. The Colossus machines cracked German codes, but the humans verified the output. The transition from human computer to electronic computer happened not in a single moment but over a decade of overlap, roughly 1940 to 1955. The word was inherited, not coined.
By the 1960s, 'computer' meant only the machine. The human meaning vanished from common usage so completely that most people today do not know it ever existed. The six ENIAC programmers were largely forgotten until the 1990s. They were written out of the history of the machine that took their name.
Related Words
Today
Every computer in the world is named after the people it replaced. The word is a memorial that nobody reads. Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Meltzer, Fran Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman programmed ENIAC by hand, routing cables and setting switches. They were the last generation to hold the job title that became the machine.
Latin putare meant 'to prune' — to cut away what is unnecessary and see what remains. That is still what a computer does. It reckons. The word was right from the start.
Explore more words