I have a very funny example of how using outdated words might lead to miscommunication, but unfortunately that particular one could get me banned, so let's just say that I'm a huge fan of picking a version of langauge from one specific time period and sticking to it, instead of having the reader do all the guesswork.

> The original meaning of the word computer was a person who calculates.

Was that ever so?

According to Google Ngrams, "computer" was not really a term until, predictably, around 1950, even though the verb "compute" has been in use throughout history (it comes from the Latin "computare", apparently).

That tells me "computer" was never a person, always a machine.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=compute%2Ccomp...