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The Antikythera Mechanism
drventure:
Don't know if any of you guys are interested in this kind of thing, but if so, Scientific American has a great writeup on the Antikythera Mechanism in the Nov issue.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=decoding-an-ancient-computer
If you don't know what it is, it's a device (or rather the remains of a device) found in 1901 that none knew what the heck it did for years.
Eventually, the thing was carbon dated to the first century BC.
Basically, the authors of the article have been working to reconstruct what this thing did and finally were able to with the help of some cutting edge scanning xray equipment called the Blade Runner (no kidding) that's been newly developed.
Essentially, its an astronomical computer, made out of brass gears (hence at least part of my interest!) and enclosed (or was enclosed) in a wood box with brass dials and gauges to read the phases of the moon, sun, earth orbits, and various time cycles (like the cycles of the olympic games, etc).
No other instrument of its complexity has been discovered back that far. The earliest next example comes in around 1100ad, more than 1000 years later!
Just the description of what these guys went through to figure out this one part of the mechanism that consisted of the weird offset pin and slot driven gearing set makes you wonder at the kind of geniuses roaming around the ancient Mediterranean.
Anyway fascinating stuff. Sorry, i just realized the article is just a stub
Here's a site with a lot more info
http://www.antikythera-mechanism.gr/
Epyx:
Thanks Drventure...supposed to be developing design documents this morning and got caught up reading the wiki entry and some other articles on the Antikythera device. I remember reading about this device years ago. It always amazes me how some in the ancient world were so enlightened and forward thinking and yet had none of the "resources" we take so for granted today.
ChadTower:
I took a cog railway up a mountain in July. ;D
shardian:
That is impressive, but our modern brethren put man on the moon with a slide rule. Epic win! ;D
Just kidding - that piece of machinery is magnificently amazing. It makes my brain hurt to even try to imagine how that machinery came about. My best guess is that it was a lifetime commitment by a very dedicated intellectual of the times. It also humbles me, because the fact that a society amazing enough to build stuff like that decays and dies fairly quickly. Really puts the good ol' US of A society in perspective huh?
drventure:
@pbj
I think Epyx was saying for someone to come up with stuff like this back 2000 years ago, without many of the modern conveniences we tend to take for granted, like even a pencil, that's impressive.
I mean, it's impressive to consider what Charles Babbage accomplished with just mechanical linkages, and then the clock and watchmakers before him, and those guys were in the 13'th through the 19'th century, more than a millennium later.
Pull that forward to today and try to project out 1600 years from now. everything you come up with would just seem like magic now.
Fun stuff, though.
Sorry for the distraction Epyx :)
@shardian
Right, they put a man on the moon with less computer power than what's in a 10$ calculator at Walmart. The progression in the last hundred years hasn't just been exponential it seems...
The next hundred years could be real interesting!
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