Slashdot Mirror

Funny, in arguement I recently had with someone about The Clock of the Long Now they link to this article (apparently to support there claim it would never last). First time i had heard about it. Now this. It's like god is a clockmaker, setting everything in motion... and building lots of crazy clocks.

What were engineers doing over 2k years ago? How about building the Antikythera Mechanism (web copy of a June 1959 Scientific American article, p60-7)

An amazingly complex, intricate, and accurate mechanical astronomical calculation device from 80 BC. Found in a shipwreck in 1900, and not fully reverse engineered until 1973, there are no other examples of this level technology in the ancient world.

"It is hard to exaggerate the singularity of this device, or its importance in forcing a complete re-evaluation of what had been believed about technology in the ancient world. For this box contained some 32 [brass] gears, assembled into a mechanism that accurately reproduced the motion of the sun and the moon against the background of fixed stars, with a differential [gear] giving their relative position and hence the phases of the moon."

You can see a reconstructed version of the Antikythera Mechanism here. Another article detailing the probable creation date of the device based on the construction of the gears can be found here"

..it was more sophisticated than anything like it until the Eighteenth Century, nearly two thousand years later!"

Another article makes the conjecture that ancient navigators could have used the Antikythera Mechanism to determine longitude via the position of the moon (1800 years before longitude calculation was perfected in England)

No

See the Architas (428 BC) mechanical bird, or the Antikyithera (87 BC)orbit calculator.

big deal. This Thing is over 2,000 years old! It's an astronaumical computer and clock thingie. With gears and everything. "boo ya," as the kids say.

That would be the Antikythera mechanism.

The site does not describe computing before the 1900's. But there were ancient computing devices that do deserve recognition. Many ancient computing devices never had moving parts, so they could not be easily identified as machines. This shows how advanced they were for their time. Stonehenge is a great example.

Some links

Two timelines here and here which date well back into B.C.

There is even an ancient Greek clocklike machine over two thousand years old that can be found here.

For those who want links to every type of computing, even modern.

From the course syllabus...

Objectives

The Department's objectives in offering this course is to provide an introductory to the history of computation - including early computing devices and their uses, and the people who developed them.

Ideally, students who successfully complete this course will improve their understanding of how the field of computing developed and matured. They will be expected to be aware of the principal people, places, and events that shaped their profession. Such students will appreciate the broad sweep of this branch of history and be able to relate it to the social and scientific changes that were taking place during the same time frames. They will also be able to describe the concepts and show some understanding of the developments and be able to differentiate and make comparisons between them.

Additional information about a fall 1998 section of this course - namely, a collection of additional readings used to supplement the course text - is also available.

(Please note - I have "highlighted" those parts of the text which I thought gave insight toward the scope of this particular class)

I am not saying this class isn't a good class, however, judging from the syllabus alone, it seems to do just what I said could only be realisticly done; namely "skim".

It is an introductory course, not designed to give an in-depth view of the history. It seeks to only point out "principal people, places, and events", which, while these individuals are important, probably leave out a lot of minor players who made contributions to the history of computing that weren't recognized until much later, if ever (people like Jaquard, with a card controlled loom, directly influenced Babbage, and further, Herman Hollerith, who later help found IBM, which went on to make the standard 80 column punch card, which led to 80 column video displays. I am certain I am leaving out steps here, but the point is this is one known example - there are many lesser known ones, and students of the course will never know about them).

I feel that this course seeks to point students in a particular direction. Perhaps some will go further with the knowledge gained from it, but most will simply take what was said in the course as "that is all there is", and not find out more about this particular area of study.

The syllabus admits to the history of computers having a "broad sweep", something that stands out in the course of all history. I dare to think, without having taken the course, that it probably starts with Pascal's investigations and inventions (or perhaps Napier's bones for calculations), and stops at the ENIAC era, with anything after that machine being relagated to "modern" times. But the fact is a lot of investigation into logic and calculation was made long before Napier or Pascal (indeed, look at the Antikythera Mechanism for such an example), and a lot of history has been made since the ENIAC.

Alas, I fear a lot of students will never really know about it, or care.

Worldcom - Generation Duh!

A good starting place for the Antikythere Mechanism