This was before Turing and von Neumann; it wasn't well established that everything is data and can be stored and manipulated in arbitrary ways. (Heck, phone com

This was before Turing and von Neumann; it wasn't well established that everything is data and can be stored and manipulated in arbitrary ways. (Heck, phone companies have trouble with this concept today). They were extrapolating what they saw as the special cases of telephones and cameras and phonographs.