"Computer" used to be a job title. Quite a lot of effort went into parallelizing algorithms so they could be dispatched to a (large) room full of people (usually men) with desktop calculators who would each play CPU.

One of my college professors had a summer job as "computer" at Grumman. Reading Neville Shute's autobiography, Slide Rule, will give a flavor of that era. One of Mr Shute's titles was that of "Chief Calculator," and he was a noted aeronautical engineer.

Information about American English usage here and here. Floating point issues? Please read this before posting. — emc

In reply to Re^2: Multi-core and the future by swampyankee
in thread Multi-core and the future by pileofrogs

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