What they mean is that before Turing, “computer” was literally a person’s job description. You hand a professional a stack of calculations with some typos, part of the job is correcting those out. Newfangled machine comes along with the same name as the job, among the first thing people are gonna ask about is where it fall short.
Like, if I made a machine called “assistant”, it’d be natural for people to point out and ask about all the things a person can do that a machine just never could.
turmacar@lemmy.world 1 week ago
And what I mean is that prior to the mid 1900s the etymology didn’t exist to cause that confusion of terms. Neither Babbage’s machines nor prior adding engines were called computers or calculators. They were ‘machines’ or ‘engines’.
Babbage’s machines were novel in that they could do multiple types of operations, but ‘mechanical calculators’ and counting machines were ~200 years old. Other aids like abacus’ are obviously far older. They were not novel enough to cause confusion in anyone with even passing interest.
But there will always be people who just assume ‘magic’, and/or “it works like I want it to”.