Comment on Oldest computer
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 4 months agoWhile there are a lot of features that I would have done differently, but I’ve got a copy of the Machinists Handbook and a trade school education. Imagine the guy who had to invent this thing as he went. dude was the Wozniak of his day.
Gacrux@lemm.ee 4 months ago
anthoer thing is that this machine clearly wasn’t the first draft. not only do we have those mentions of “spheres”, but there aren’t that many mistakes we see in the construction of the mechanism (apart from the dovetail joint). clearly the layout of the gears was planned beforehand, or they did trial-and-error with the gears on another version of the mechanism.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
Yeah Chris of youtube channel Clickspring has said during his replica build that there are features that suggest the maker was trying to make the mechanism more compact, like some gears that are friction fit on their axles rather than pinned to leave their tops flat, which suggests this wasn’t the maker’s first rodeo.
The thing that blows my mind the most about the Antikythera mechanism is that we don’t have anything else remotely like it in the archeological record from anywhere near the time it must have been made. You can imagine a simpler but still useful gear-based calendar device, maybe similar to this one but with fewer functions, being made before this. But no evidence of them survives to the modern day.
It would be like exploring a Civil War site and finding the corroded remains of an Apple Newton. While relatively primitive compared to later, more successful PDAs and smart phones, it’s still a surprisingly functional machine and way more sophisticated than you thought possible for the context you found it in that you wonder if it’s not significantly newer than its surroundings.
Gacrux@lemm.ee 4 months ago
that is true. the mechanism shows us that they definitely had some mechanism making culture going on. my point is that this sort of thing was 100% doable for their level of tech, and that it is us who have misunderstood history.