[mtone]

> Starting from scratch you load a book, music, or video onto an iPad by connecting them to another computer.

That doesn't help making the differentiation between a terminal and a standalone computer. Computing has always been a networked thing, we just now have a transport medium that is faster than a floppy disk.

Mainframes were loading punched cards, cloud datacenters are loading user data, and tablets are loading books and video.

And the moment you annotate that PDF or manage synced documents, you are now editing content.

[Retric]

As strange as it might seem early computers where not networked. Early computers generally had a front panel that you could use to load programs by hand making them very much a standalone device.

At least in the context that a modern PC's graphics card is not thought of as a separate computer.