• @[email protected]
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    141 year ago

    And this is the reason people in IT often refer to computers as “machines”, because at some point they started to replace the people doing the computations, and they needed to differentiate.

    (At least that’s the story I’ve heard)

    • @[email protected]
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      91 year ago

      It’s also to differentiate the physical hardware from e.g. a VM with a given chunk of compute that you’ve rented from a cloud provider.

      In other words, one “machine” may host more than one “system” or “instance”, so it’s a useful bit of differentiation on that end as well.

    • @[email protected]
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      21 year ago

      Wow, that’s wild. First time I’ve heard that. So a Virtual Machine is an instance of this?