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Computers are just really fast calculators. Calculators are just weird abaci made out of sand. Modems are just phones for computers. Phones are just smoke signals through a wire. By reducing things to their absolute basics, it's easy to lose track of the fact that reductions in size or increases in speed are sometimes the driving force of progress, far more than the original concept ever was.

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> Computers are just really fast calculators.

In what way is a Universal Turing Machine equivalent, stored-program, probably Von Neumann architecture computer in any way "really just" a fast calculator? The computer may contain an ALU, but the ability to change the program makes the computer capable of far more that a fancy ALU (calculator).

There are a lot of people that wish they could stuff the genie called "Turing complete" back in its bottle and go back to the days of selling merely a calculator (or "app"liance), but as Cory Doctorow put it[1], "...an appliance is not a stripped-down computer -- it is a fully functional computer with spyware on it out of the box."

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg

When computers first became a thing, that's what people thought of them as. Many did not see their potential outside of raw number crunching. ordinary's position, which I share, is that the "smartphones are just portable computers" sentiment is repeating this mistake.

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