1960s theory that Stonehenge was a prehistoric computer

As the last two paragraphs of TFA point out, this idea is now widely discredited.

However, there are a lot of things that don't seem widely known in popular culture about Stonehenge that might colour perceptions about this theory, and the counters to it.

First, it's worth remembering the thing you look at today has been mucked about with for thousands of years. It's not "original". Depending on your definition of that word, it's either a comparatively modern fake, or the current evolution of something that's always evolving.

For perspective: the stones now have concrete bases. Officials were concerned in the 1920s that the "conservation work" being done at that time was starting to head into "faking" the monument. Cranes were used to "reassemble" the famous (c.f. Spinal Tap), "Great Trilithon" in 1958. Make your own mind up.

But let's just pull it back to post holes and the archaeology of what has been discovered in more recent decades, even in this century.

Archaeologists now know that the site evolved even in the earliest incarnations over thousands of years. There is also now evidence it should not just be seen as a single stone circle. Within the nearby - ~5 miles radius - landscape, there is evidence of other circles, roads, burial mounds, feasting sites, all settlements slowly being understood.

We also now know a lot more of nearby cremations and burials, some of high-status individuals, over the course of hundreds of years. Turns out people travelled from all over, including continental Europe, to visit Stonehenge over a very prolonged period of time. Women seem to have been particularly key to the site.

All of this suggests something complex within the cultural mindset of the neolithic people who built that landscape, and the subsequent populations that moved into it and adapted it. It's not just a stone circle used to predict/measure equinoxes or eclipses - as important as those things might have been to ancient peoples. The site carried weight.

Was it the ancient version of Mecca? Or the Temple on the Mount? Or was it something more trivial and akin to the modern (nearby-ish) Glastonbury festival or Burning Man?

We don't know. We will probably never know for sure unless ancient contemporaneous writing is discovered and understood. But we know it wasn't just a prehistoric "computer".

Since it was part of a World's Fair, it is unsurprising today that the Eiffel Tower was slated for demolition. I grew up very near to Balboa Park, and it was rather late in life that I learned that all those buildings were sort of hastily erected for the Panama–California Exposition, 110 years ago, and they were expected to be demolished quickly, or decay, because they were never intended for permanent habitation. And so the intervening years have been a saga of very industrious preservation and restoration, as most all of the buildings have been deemed to be architectural marvels and very much worth keeping around.

>planned to be temporary

Same for the Atomium in Brussels, Belgium.

I think people underestimate how similar to us people were a few thousand years ago. We build places like Glastonbury and Burning Man all the time and it doesn’t really mean much beyond looking kind of cool. Stonehenge might just be something like that.

You do if you want a durable record of your observations e.g., for the purposes of showing future generations you could align with spring solstice, or predict phases of moon, or eclipses. That's impressive and maybe even useful.