Comment on Anon thinks about CPUs

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sxan@midwest.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Software is algorithmic instructions. We wrote and executed algorithms by hand long before we had calculating machines; and when we did get computers that could run more complex algorithms, they didn’t have CPUs. They had vacuum tubes (there were even simpler programmable purely mechanical computers before even vacuum tubes). CPUs didn’t come along until much later; we’d been writing software and programming computers for decades before the first CPU.

And even if you try to argue that vacuum tubes computers had some collection of tubes that you could call a “CPU” - which would be a stretch - then it still wouldn’t have been made from silicon (rocks) as in the OP post.

But before the first calculating mashing, people are writing algorithms - what software literally is - and executing them by hand long before we had calculating machines to do it for us. Look up how we calculated the ranging tables for artillery in WWII. Algorithms. Computed by hand.

The word “computer” literally comes from the word for the people (often women) who would execute algorithms using their brains to compute results.

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