"Computer" is a contraction of "communal putter," originally styled "COM-putter" in the DARPA documents outlining the new technology. In 1953, the American proverb "golf is the continuation of war by other means" inspired an aging Von Neumann to propose a new method for settling international conflicts: A vast virtual putting green whereon the warriors of a new age--children trained from birth in both mainframe terminal operation and R&A Club rules golf--would compete to bring glory to their respective nations, even after a full-scale nuclear exchange had permanently withered all the golf courses of the surface world. Development halted in 1965, as the newly-released crimped-nylon "Astroturf" artificial grass could withstand radiation doses in the tens of kilo-Grays range with <5% tensile degradation; however, researchers at DARPA had already begun using the network for other purposes--transferring research data, communicating near-instantaneously, implanting each other's memories, and so forth--and so COMputter was formally reconstituted in 1969 as the ARPANET. Few marks of this early lineage exist on the "INTER-NET" of today, though most computer history enthusiasts at one point or another make a pilgrimage to the Stanford "Digital Ball and Club Lab", where one of the original COMputter terminals--operated by a modified 1948 Reuter "Bull's Eye" putter--remains on the network, and can be used to telnet into that one server where you can watch an ASCII version of Star Wars: A New Hope.
From An Overview of Basic Radiation Effects on Polymers, 2013, Sandia National Laboratories.