 A striking feature of contemporary work in experimental mathematics is that it is done using computers. Is this reliance on complex pieces of electronics what makes the field ‘experimental’? If one looks at what gets published in contemporary journals, books, and conferences devoted to experimental mathematics, the impression is that all the items are closely bound up with computers. For example, there does not appear to be a single paper published in more than a decade’s worth of issues of Experimental Mathematics that does not involve the use of computers. What about the kinds of examples which mathematicians tend to offer as paradigms of experimental mathematics? Here the data is less clear. On the one hand, an informal survey suggests that the majority of such exemplars do involve the explicit use of computers. On the other hand, it is not uncommon for mathematicians also to cite one or more historical examples, from well before the computer age, to illustrate the purported pedigree of the subdiscipline.