• Revan343@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    Forget that, most of the first computers were women.

    Google it. A ‘computer’ was a person employed to perform computations, and was a profession which generally employed women

    • mim@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      And this is the reason people in IT often refer to computers as “machines”, because at some point they started to replace the people doing the computations, and they needed to differentiate.

      (At least that’s the story I’ve heard)

      • entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        It’s also to differentiate the physical hardware from e.g. a VM with a given chunk of compute that you’ve rented from a cloud provider.

        In other words, one “machine” may host more than one “system” or “instance”, so it’s a useful bit of differentiation on that end as well.

      • toothpaste_sandwich
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        1 year ago

        Wow, that’s wild. First time I’ve heard that. So a Virtual Machine is an instance of this?

    • AshLassay@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Yep computing was considered secretarial work. That’s why only women did that job since the men got higher ranking jobs.