Back when calculators were people (PDF):
Oxford has such a long intellectual history that even the episodes that made it illustrious are liable to be forgotten. One such took place in the second quarter of the fourteenth century, when a group of Oxonians developed a battery of new techniques for dealing with philosophical problems, the strikingly mathematical nature of their approach earning them the epithet of ‘calculators’.
These were among the people doing first-rate mathematical physics before Galileo and Newton. They had funny names like Heytesbury and Swineshead, but they were quill and parchment wizards.
The Finch and Pea 