[dahart]

Where’s this quote from? Who said it? Using a washing machine as your counter example feels like a straw man. Is a calculator not a computer?

* edit just to add your quote is definitely wrong. A CPU is a set of logic gates that executes a fixed set of operations.

People have used the word “computer” for a lot of non-programmable machines over the years, and it’s clear in the Wikipedia article I linked to that programmability is a recent feature of computers, and was not always there. (Nor is it always there to this day.)

While I’m sure you can find examples of people that agree with you, that doesn’t invalidate history. A computer is anything that computes something, that’s how the word has been defined and used up to and including today. This includes the Antikythera (analog computer) and even (loosely) the Abacus (digital “computer”).