How many of you like HP41C calculators?

Tom's point is well taken. However, I would argue that the historical usage of the term _computer_ perhaps gives the best justification for current usage. The term _computer_ in the middle 19th century referred to "a person who computes." That is, a person with a pad and pencil, a set of data, and a specification of the values to determine from those data. The result was the computation. Prior to the existence of automatic data processors, companies employed huge staff, housed is great open rooms, where desks invited hours of tedious computation. That some here refer to _computers_ only in the case of the stored program is to miss the point. In fact, the unit record equipment of the early 20th century constituted a computer, its program being provided by a plug board (a kind of storage - however abstract). Moreover, there is the _analog computer_ with programming very similar to the unit record equipment, and such machines have always been known as computers. The important point for computation is closure, and Turing is the ideal model. It is not efficient, it is not pretty but, all systems that exhibit computational closure are Turing machine equivalents, and this is the foundation of computer science. William R. Buckley