Computus" - this is the name of the book in which medieval historian Arno Borst explains that the word computer comes from the term "computus", which is ancient and versatile. Even in ancient times, people used "computus" to record numbers and time and to express the measurability and calculability of objects and processes.
In the 1940s, "computing machines" appeared in the USA, which were renamed "computers", curiously using the word that had previously been reserved for the opposite of machines, namely for the women who were supposed to analyze photographs of the sky at Harvard University's observatory. When computers became faster, more accurate and equipped with larger memories in the 1970s, quantum computers were still in the distant future. With their computing capacities, their manufacturers now risk making predictions about future worlds. Predictions for 2050 include the cure for cancer, energy supply through nuclear fusion and routine flights to the moon, which sounds strange to anyone who still has the promises of futurologists from the 1960s in their ears, who announced the end of religious wars as well as the extensive use of nuclear power plants to solve all earthly energy problems. While most people work on their computers in the form of laptops, the decisive quality of these machines emerges in their opposite - life itself. Cells, like computers, are about information, and droplets of bacteria can store more than the entire internet. Biological systems are both extremely compact and highly energy-efficient, which has led computer experts to believe that computing is part of life. Fungi, for example, exhibit a wide range of perceptions when responding to light, chemicals, gravity, mechanical stress and the pH in their environment. In previous perceptual research, it was thought that detecting chains of signals was sufficient to understand the responses of life. With the increasing availability of computers and the ubiquity of information to be processed and the algorithms needed to do so, it is hard to dismiss the idea that one of life's abilities - its computational skills - has been overlooked. Incidentally, the philosopher Leibniz believed that God created the world by calculating.
