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

Today I Learned (TIL)

6732 readers
1 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 64 points 2 years 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] 15 points 2 years 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] 10 points 2 years 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 2 years ago (1 children)

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

[–] 4z01235 5 points 2 years 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 2 years ago

That's what I meant, yes!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years 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 2 years ago (1 children)

TIL that she was the daughter of the poet Byron

[–] yetAnotherUser 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

TIL that her last name is King

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

NVidia tarnished the name this generation.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

And they're doing Grace Hopper next

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years 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).