Before computers, "computers" were people. It was a job title for numerical calculation. It's a curious thing, but numerical computing predates computers. One

Before computers, "computers" were people. It was a job title for numerical calculation. It's a curious thing, but numerical computing predates computers. One striking linguistic feature is that in computational fluid dynamics (a kind of numerical computation), a method of calculation is called "a code". Whereas, for software development, a program's specific instructions are called "code". The CFD usage wrong to me, but since they were first... maybe we were the monsters all along? In the future, we may have cellular/biochemical computation, or quantum calculation, or calculation based on some other phenonema (neutrinos?), perhaps not yet discovered. Meanwhile, there's a pedantic argument that all known computation is really "electrical" (including human neuron pulses).