Looks like the author feels similarly: > If you stare at an old mechanical calculator it just sits there. It does no computing and is, therefore, not a compute

Looks like the author feels similarly: > If you stare at an old mechanical calculator it just sits there. It does no computing and is, therefore, not a computer. When a person starts punching the keys and turning the crank the person-device computes and is a computer. So too, an abacus is just an assembly of beads and rods or lines and pebbles, and is not a computer. But when a person uses the abacus to perform calculations, then the person-abacus is a computer.