this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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Today I Learned (TIL)

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[–] [email protected] 62 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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)

[–] [email protected] 9 points 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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Virtualization came a fair bit later, but this might explain why they are called Virtual Machines and not Virtual Computers?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

That's what I meant, yes!

[–] AshLassay 9 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

TIL that she was the daughter of the poet Byron

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

TIL that her last name is King

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

It wasn't exactly a nuclear family with a simple titling.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

NVidia tarnished the name this generation.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And they're doing Grace Hopper next

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Seeing the odd generation to be better than the even one, let's hope 5xxx series is good and cheaper (Jensen will disagree with this though).