I suppose if I go with the spirit of your statement, it is possible to argue that both computers and medicine were done in some form or another for the last 5 thousand years (think abacus, folk herbalism, etc). It is just that we have figured out how to leverage greater resources (including information) to do those in a much more effective way.<p>On the other hand, the combination of embodied knowledge and chemical energy to create machines, i.e. the internal combustion engine, is a truly novel achievement of our civilization.