Electronic brain
The 1940s newspaper word for a computer — loathed by the people who built them, loved by everyone else, and back almost verbatim seventy years later.
When ENIAC was unveiled on 14 February 1946, the press needed a word for what it was looking at. The brain analogy was close at hand: the parallel between nerve cell and switching circuit was fresh after the McCulloch and Pitts paper of 1943, and the builders' own vocabulary already spoke of memory and organs. Edmund Berkeley's 1949 book Giant Brains, or Machines That Think turned the phrase into a genre.
The professionals objected, Howard Aiken among the louder ones. The machine calculated quickly and did nothing else, and calling it a brain produced both inflated expectations and needless alarm — two things that tend to travel together. The word stuck in the press well into the 1960s all the same, and British papers cheerfully described the Manchester machines as electronic brains that could think.
Then it faded, replaced by the far duller computer, and for a few decades it looked like an embarrassing adolescence. That the identical imagery is back around language models — reasoning, understanding, hallucinating — probably says more about how people describe things they cannot inspect than about the machines in question.