The Antikythera Mechanism is a wildly improbable object, an astronomical computing tool (quite possibly) made by the engineer/mathematician Archimedes in the 3rd century BC, and found in a Roman shipwreck in 1900. And tonight on many American Public Broadcasting System stations, you can see the video describing the latest research yourself.
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The video Ancient Computer covers the history of the discovery, the way the research team of engineers, mathematicians, historians, and astronomers have figured out its purpose, and the disappearance of the technology--or maybe not.
- Full Review of Ancient Computer
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- Photo essay on the Antikythera Mechanism (from 2008, with updated bibliography)
Comments
The narrator repeatedly mentions the notion that this was “the first computer.”
This amazingly complex machine could only have been the latest computer of the age, not the first.
Clearly both the concepts and technology revealed by the mechanism had been under development for a long time before it was assembled. Such things don’t just spring up like Topsy.
You make a valid point, but in the absence of evidence that an earlier version exists, it’s pretty safe to say this is the first Computer.
The Antikythera Mechanism is, based on the Hellenic philosophy of a mathematical concept of the “symban-kosmos” as an astronomical computing tool – something like a universal clock for the movements of the earth -moon and planets … form this comes the workings of the common watch [timepiece], also the foundations of analog computers. One most note that is was from the Romans stolen and by fate was not to leave Greece – just as many other items have been ripped off, or Klopy-righted to western Europe.