[swagempire]

This is incredibly incorrect. If you are going to bore Hacker News with pedantry-- at least bother to look up that the "modern" era ended somewhere around 1945.

So yes, it refers to a specific era in the past.

[charcircuit]

The modern era was the current era when that term was coined. The usage of modern in modern computers does not refer to the modern era. Here is a link to an example of Intel using the term "Modern CPU Architecture."

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-tec...

Here Intel is talking about CPUs from the present. It isn't talking about CPUs from the 1940s.

[lebean]

Quite a hill to die on. If I were to exhibit the same kind of pedantry you are, where a compound noun can have exactly one meaning regardless of context and specialized terms are disallowed, then I'd point out that computer != CPU so your example is irrelevant.

Folks here are genuinely trying to help. "Modern computer" clearly has a special meaning in the context of building a computer from scratch; the term is used in contrast to calculators or specialized number-crunching machines, both of which are computers and are of interest to tinkerers.