Computer

Computers were once human!

In fact, before the word was applied to machines, humans were the first to be called “computers,” as defined further down in this article:

“Barbara 'Barby' Canright joined California’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1939. As the first female ‘human computer,’ her job was to calculate anything from how many rockets were needed to make a plane airborne to what kind of rocket propellants were needed to propel a spacecraft. These calculations were done by hand, with pencil and graph paper, often taking more than a week to complete and filling up six to eight notebooks with data and formulas.”

Source: history.com

"’Computer’ comes from the Latin ‘putare’ which means both to think and to prune. Virgil's Georgics - depictions of country life - speak of tidying vines by pruning (fingitque putando).

“The link in sense seems to be tidying, setting to rights, balancing an account, reckoning up. The historian Tacitus wrote ‘if the number of soldiers is counted’ (si numerus militum putatur).

“Computare (com- means ‘together’) also meant calculate - Pliny's Natural History tells how the breadth of Asia should be ‘rightly calculated’ (sane computetur).”

Source: The Vocalularist, bbc.com

computer(n.)

“(In the)1640s, ‘one who calculates, a reckoner, one whose occupation is to make arithmetical calculations,’ agent noun from compute (v.).

“Meaning ‘calculating machine’ (of any type) is from 1897; in modern use, ‘programmable digital electronic device for performing mathematical or logical operations,’ 1945 under this name (the thing itself was described by 1937 in a theoretical sense as Turing machine). ENIAC (1946) usually is considered the first.”

Source: etymonline.com