> Machine learning is a set of techniques developed to attack modeling problems that traditional algorithms couldn't solve. So if the algorithm was developed and used before computers it definitely isn't machine learning

I think that it's important to note here that this was the set of problems that computer science researchers didn't know how to solve.

In the early days, they mostly ended up re-inventing statistical methods.

And to be fair, a neural net is just a bunch of linear models joined by a non-linearity. In that case, it's essentially stacked logistic regression, which was invented before computers.