I recall in Feynman’s story about Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, the computers were the girls who operated the Comptometers (really big adding machines) and passed their results to the next operator in line. The lineup of operators was, of course, the algorithm determined by the scientist or engineer looking for (for example) just how many microseconds the explosion front took to propagate across the mass of (ordinary) explosive, so as to compress the fissiles just right…

They may have pasted up kitties when there was slack time, tho!

(Its actually due to most English printing being done on the continent, where the letter ‘thorn’ was not used, so the nearest equivalent, the letter ‘y’, was used instead. In old english, ‘thorn’ was used to denote the ‘th’ sound in the word ‘the’)