"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.

There's also a wonderful book called "Weather prediction by numerical process" by Lewis Fry Richardson, published in, IIRC, the 1920s. In it he explains how to predict the weather using methods similar to what we use now, the significant difference being that instead of handing the data to a computer, he would hand it to a vast amphitheatre full of people, all of them trained to perform particular mathematical operations accurately, who would pass their results one to the other until all the data was crunched. His "computers" even had a clock signal just like ours - a conductor standing where they could all see him.

who would pass their results one to the other until all the data was crunched.

It that bit that means you need threads rather than processes.

(Or processes that do IPC through shared memory which has all the downsides plus more of threads.)

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Any one interested in "Weather prediction by numerical process" may find this interesting.