A matter in which I wish to take exception.
Cray, the supercomputer company, is selling a desktop unit called the CX1. Their product literature uses the term "personal supercomputing" here and there. Also HPC, high performance computing. A bit of scouting with Mr Google turns up a price of $25,000 (and up) for one of these units. If I had a CX1 I could finally get those hydrodynamic simulations finished for my cold fusion reactor.
I've never been able to refer to a computer as a machine. It's a circuit. Somehow the flow of a few coulombs of charge across the bandgap and through the microscopic vias of lithographed and ion implanted junctions never qualified in my internal taxonomy as a machine. Surely there are countless pencil necks and Poindexters out there who will line up to quibble. But, it's a damned circuit. The cooling fan is a machine. The screws that hold the major components are elementary machines. The Klikkenhooters on the mouse are machine-like I suppose.
My eyes cross every time I hear some silly sod in the IT department solemnly state that they have fixed a problem in some persons "machine". Oh, is that true skippy? Chances are that young Edison selected a pull down menu and changed the state of some software variable or swapped out an errant disk drive. Machines make you greasy. You skin your knuckles tightening bolts on them. A Harley-Davidson motorcycle is a machine. A Dell laptop is not.
Fiat Lux