From very dimly remembered courses 30+ years ago, I think the Jacquard
Loom (Sp.?  I never took French, only German.), which used a series of
"tiles" with holes punched in them to encode the pattern that
eventually emerged in the woven fabric, was considered a part of the
evolution of the digital computer.

This kind of "punched card"-driven loom is still in use today,
I believe, and the cards from this kind of loom are ascribed to be the
forerunner of the "IBM" punched card driven digital computers of the
'50s and '60s, whose hole pattern was known as the "Hollerith" code.
In both cases, we have machines whose performance or behavior was
determined/directed by the information encoded via a punched hole card.

So given these two "end points" in time and concept, the player piano
-- a device whose performance was driven by the punched hole encoding
on the roll, and whose invention and major period of performance falls
between these two "end points" -- might logically be considered to be,
as a minimum, a primitive or at least forerunner of today's digital
computer.

One person's opinion.

Harvey Chao

 [ That's a good argument, Harvey.  The self-playing musical instru-
 [ ment is a very close relative (maybe a descendent) of the self-
 [ weaving loom.  Perhaps they don't "compute", but they obediently
 [ follow instructions!  -- Robbie