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by fl4regun 44 days ago
Why do machines have to "make" things? Is a car not a machine?
2 comments

I've been reading Dashiell Hammett detective stories from the early 1920s and it seems like cars were almost exclusively referred to colloquially as 'machines' back then.
Steel machines of hell. That’s how I saw them in an editorial work dating back to the early 1900’s talking about the arrival of cars in the city.
Some languages still colloquially refer to cars with the same word used for machine.
A lever is classified as a simple machine.

Wrt the space shuttle, I would take some issue because you could say it's not just one machine, but a collection of many, for example it probably has onboard computer systems that are not always in use. It would be a bit like saying that a whole factory is "a machine". Whereas the ASML devices serve one single clear purpose.