Did Alan Turing coin the term “digital computer”? There’s a heady set of questions here: when was the modern-day computer invented, and was Turing its father — in its conception, its realization and/or its naming? The movie The Imitation Game, set in England during the Second World War, is all about the British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, mathematical biologist, pioneering computer scientist, and marathon and ultra-distance runner, and it does give us a clue. There’s a significant moment in the movie when Turing (played by the ubiquitous Benedict Cumberbatch) explains to his friend and fellow code-breaker Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley) his theory of computing and his new invention — a machine called Christopher. (Watch the movie to find out the reason for the name, and what exactly Christopher was built to do.) Here’s that moment, and it isn’t really a spoiler:

Keira Knightley: “Are you trying to build your universal machine?” [Cumberbatch raises his famous brows and looks at her quizzically.] “I read your paper at university.”

Benedict Cumberbatch (looking slightly horrified): “Is it already being taught?”

Knightley: “No! [smiling] No, I was precocious. So … You …. you theorized a machine that could solve any problem. It didn’t just do one thing, it did everything; it wasn’t just programmable, it was reprogrammable.”

Cumberbatch: “Mm.” [Nods in agreement]

Knightley: “Is that your idea behind Christopher?”

Cumberbatch: “Well, human brains can compute large sums very quickly. Even Hugh [one of Turing’s Bletchley colleagues] can do that, but I want Christopher to be smarter. To make a calculation and then, er, to determine what to do next — like a person does. Think of it: an electrical brain. A digital computer.”

Knightley: “A digital computer?”

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It’s a moment when your ears might prick up and your brain might scream “linguistic anachronism! Weren’t digital computers invented in the late 20th century?” But it isn’t an anachronism. In fact, the words computer and digital* had both been in use for centuries — although with different meanings; they would both undergo significant transformations over the years as scientific and logical thought and technologies developed. And Turing was indeed one of the first great minds to put them together as a theoretical scientific concept, if not as an actual machine. In his paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, published in Mind in 1950, Turing asked, “Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?”  (The “Imitation Game” is what Turing called what later came to be known as his “Turing test”.)

The Online Etymology Dictionary traces the development of the word computer right back to the 1640s, when it meant “one who calculates,” an agent noun of the verb to compute. (In 2003, the BBC told the story of one such historical and indeed historic “computer”: a mathematician from Calcutta, named Radhanath Sickdhar, who basically discovered the highest mountain in the world, in 1852.) But then we started inventing calculating machines, and over the ensuing decades the word began to refer to machines as well as to clever human minds. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word computer meaning “an apparatus for making calculations”, specifically referring to “an automatic electronic machine for making rapid calculations or controlling operations that are expressible in numerical or logical terms”, dates from the late 19th century. The Online Etymology Dictionary dates the modern word computer — a calculating machine of any type — specifically to 1897. However, as late as the 1930s and ’40s (as the Alan Turing Scrapbook explains), a computer still meant a person doing calculations, so adjectives and qualifiers were needed in front of the increasingly ambiguous noun to clarify what sort of machine people were describing — human or inanimate, conceptual or actual. A version of the “Turing machine”, a theoretical or hypothetical computer device conceived in Alan Turing’s mind in 1936, was eventually realized as a “programmable digital electronic computer” in the mid-1940s: the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer), conceived and designed by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert and described by the press at the time as a “giant brain”, was widely considered to be the first actual electronic general-purpose computer, which was first unveiled to the public in 1946. But Turing did think of it first.

The phrase “computer literacy” is recorded from 1970. An attempt in the early 1980s to establish the word computerate (an adjective, meaning “computer literate”, modeled on the word literate) didn’t really catch on, even though it is listed by several dictionaries (including Oxford, Cambridge and Macmillan). Computerese — “the jargon of programmers” — is from 1960, as are computerize and computerization.

* The Oxford English Dictionary defines digital as “of, pertaining to, using, or being a digit or digits (in the sense of one of the ten arabic numerals from 0 to 9), spec. designating a computer which operates on data in the form of digits or similar discrete elements. Rare before the mid 20th century.” The Online Etymology Dictionary dates digital to the 1650s, “pertaining to fingers,” from Latin digitalis, from digitus. Meaning “using numerical digits” it dates from 1938, especially of computers after c.1945; in reference to recording or broadcasting, from 1960.

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Thanks, Francine, for the idea.