From the 1600s, "computer" meant a person employed to compute: astronomical tables, artillery trajectories, census math. NASA's human computers, many of them women like Katherine Johnson, calculated the orbits that put Americans in space. The machine inherited their job title in the 1940s.
Assessment: Fully documented, and only recently restored to public memory.
Stories
The name was deliberately erased
Some retellings imply a deliberate plot to hide the women's contribution by renaming the machines.
Assessment: No plot needed. Job titles migrate to machines constantly: a "typewriter" was once a person too. The erasure was social, not lexical.
Interesting claims
The first computers were human; the last humans will be computers
The claim that circulates in AI debates: naming the machines after the human rooms was a declaration of intent. The job title was always a placeholder, the humans were training their replacement for three centuries, and the word kept the receipt.
Assessment: The occupational history is documented, and the symmetry is genuinely eerie as rhetoric. As an argument it is retrospective prophecy: nobody hiring human computers in 1940 was planning GPT. Words are bad at keeping secrets and very good at looking prophetic afterward.
Sources and further reading
OED, computer, earliest attestation 1613, a person who computes
Ada Lovelace, Notes to Menabrea's memoir on the Analytical Engine, 1843
Worth asking
When machines took the name, the people disappeared from the story. Who else has been renamed out of history?