More generally, there was a dedicated instrument to calculate areas of a map or drawing, the planimeter, widely used before the advent of (affordable) computing

More generally, there was a dedicated instrument to calculate areas of a map or drawing, the planimeter, widely used before the advent of (affordable) computing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planimeter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planimeter https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16032930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16032930