computer：もとは職業の名前だった

If you had told someone 150 years ago that you were a computer, they wouldn't have been surprised at all. They would simply have assumed you were good at maths. That's because "computer" originally meant a person, not a machine. The word comes from the verb "compute", which means to calculate, and it was first used in English in the early 1600s to describe someone who did calculations. For centuries, human computers did vital work. They calculated the positions of stars and planets for sailors, produced tables of numbers for engineers and worked out the paths of artillery shells for armies. It was slow, careful and often boring work, and mistakes could be very costly. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many human computers were women. At Harvard University, a team of women carefully studied photographs of the night sky and made important discoveries about the stars. Later, at NASA, women like Katherine Johnson did the calculations that helped send astronauts into space. Her story was told in the film Hidden Figures. When electronic calculating machines were invented in the 1940s, people started calling them "electronic computers" or "automatic computers", to show that they did the same job as the human ones. Over time, the machines became faster, cheaper and far more powerful, and they took over the work completely. Eventually, people dropped the extra words, and "computer" came to mean only the machine. So the device you're reading this on is named after a job that it made disappear.