Texts for additional reading

Text 1. The Word “Computer”

Over the years there have been several slightly different meanings to the word computer, and several different words for the thing we now usually call a computer.

For instance, “computer” was once commonly used to mean a person employed to do arithmetic calculations, with or without mechanical aids. During World War II it referred to U.S. and British servicewomen whose job was to calculate the trajectories of large artillery shells with such machines.

Charles Babbage designed one of the first computing machines called the Analytical engine, but due to technological problems it was not built in his lifetime. Various simple mechanical devices such as the slide rule and abacus have also been called computers. In some cases they were referred to as “analog computers”, as they represented numbers by continuous physical quantities rather than by discrete binary digits.

In thinking of other words for the computer, it is worth noting that in other languages the word chosen does not always have the same literal meaning as the English language word. In French, for example, the word is “ordinateur”, which means approximately “organizer”. The Spanish word is “ordenador” with the same meaning, although in some countries they use the anglicism computadora. In Italian a computer is “calcolatore”, calculator, emphasizing its computational uses over logical ones. In Swedish a computer is called “dator” from “data”. In Finnish a computer is called “tietokone” which means “information machine”. In Chinese a computer is called “dian nao” or “an electric brain’.