this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
215 points (94.6% liked)

Today I Learned (TIL)

6549 readers
28 users here now

You learn something new every day; what did you learn today?

/c/til is a community for any true knowledge that you would like to share, regardless of topic or of source.

Share your knowledge and experience!

Rules

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
top 13 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] Revan343@lemmy.ca 64 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

[–] mim@lemmy.sdf.org 15 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)

[–] entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org 10 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.

[–] toothpaste_sandwich@feddit.nl 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?

[–] 4z01235@lemmy.ca 5 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?

[–] toothpaste_sandwich@feddit.nl 3 points 1 year ago

That's what I meant, yes!

[–] AshLassay@lemmy.world 8 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.

[–] bernieecclestoned@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

TIL that she was the daughter of the poet Byron

[–] yetAnotherUser@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

TIL that her last name is King

[–] XTL@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 year ago

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

[–] hunt4peas@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

NVidia tarnished the name this generation.

[–] entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And they're doing Grace Hopper next

[–] hunt4peas@lemmy.ml 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).