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TIL that the first computer programmer was a woman. Her name was Ada Lovelace.
(www.britannica.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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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
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)
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.
Wow, that's wild. First time I've heard that. So a Virtual Machine is an instance of this?
Virtualization came a fair bit later, but this might explain why they are called Virtual Machines and not Virtual Computers?
That's what I meant, yes!
Yep computing was considered secretarial work. That’s why only women did that job since the men got higher ranking jobs.