Another song from 1973: “Miss Clarke and the Computer” from Roy Wood’s Boulders.
From the very first reply:
Without more context, it’s hard to tell if this qualifies. Before the term was used for an electronic device, “computer” meant a human, usually a woman, who did tedious calculations for some (almost always male) scientist or engineer, because the scientist’s or engineer’s time was too valuable for that. And regardless of how true it was, there was a long-running cliche of said tech men having affairs with their computers.
Judging from Jagger’s famous reputation as a horndog, I suspect he meant a human computer.
I doubt that. By 1967 the use of “computer” to refer to a machine was very common and well-known even in popular culture. The older use of it to refer to a person was quite obsolete by that time.
Ok, I believe you, I was born a year after the song came out and couldn’t really judge the meaning. Maybe human computers were still in living memory and Jagger intended it to be a double entendre?
I was in college (studying computer science) just after the song came out, and it being 2,000 Man, he meant the current meaning of computer, I’m sure. I think it is one of the best predictions from rock, given that a man spending time watching porn on his computer could be thought of as having an affair with it.
In 1971, on War Movie on Bark, Jefferson Airplane talked about computer killers. That was back when computers were all in glass houses (all except minis, of course.)
In Bozos from Firesign Theatre much of the computer stuff comes from DEC-10 console messages (5 jobs, 2 detached.) DEC 10s were used a lot in AI research, at the MIT AI Lab for instance. Not surprising they saw one once.
Connie Francis recorded “Robot Man” in 1960. It was a hit in England and Australia.
Computer or no, you decide.
1969
