Hi all, I am one of the authors, I am working for Georgian Partners as a machine learning researchers and we decided to share this collection of tools as it has been useful to our team. Feel free to ask me anything. Thanks!
The concept of logic systems themselves have far preceeded the first electrical circuits. I am sure this was put to physical use somewhere in history, but to call it a "computer" would be kind of a stretch. Very doubtful in my opinion, certainly not a computer to any extend we would imagine one today.
Not neccesarily. Granted this is how I would configure a system (two providers), but it is just as sensical to use one major provider which falls back to company servers in the event of an attack like this. It is all in sysadmin preference, while it is smart to relegate low-level tasks to managed providers it is also smart to have a backup solution that is under full control just in case that control needs to be taken at some point in time.