Computing Machine Terminology

IN a recent letter in Nature1, Prof. R. O. Kapp raises a protest against the use of certain expressions current in the vocabulary of computing machine designers. The chief burden of Prof. Kapp's remarks is directed against the use of anthropomorphic terms, and it is perhaps of interest to see how these arose. The earliest idea for an all-purpose computing machine, in the modern sense, was due to Charles Babbage2, who used the terms: mill = portion of machine which operates on numbers; store = portion of machine which holds numbers and emits or absorbs them at the direction of the machine.