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A 2,000-year-old device often referred to as the world's oldest "computer" has been recreated by scientists trying to understand how it worked.
Unbelievable how advanced they were 2000 years ago.
If you read Graham Hancock's books you will realise there are many clues to the ancients being extremely clever. They knew all about the presession of the Equinoxes and encoded this into many ancient structures (Stonehenge, Pyramids, etc) . After reading some of this kind of book, I personally feel there is evidence that we humans have had a few rises and falls over our history and that some of the ancient structures are far older than our science dates them. It would explain some of the huge structures and the positions (up mountains) they have been built.
If I remember some of the stuff from these books correctly, the Flood event (or ~12->9.5000 BC) seems to have been a major point in history when mankind was put back to almost a hunter-gatherer and after that myths and legends from various races tell of wandering 'wise men' who came from the sea and taught the sciences, writing, etc and then disappeared again. The theory is they came from Atlantis or some other advanced civilisation which had been destroyed and these guys survived somehow.
Not sure you are going to get much of a discussion in this forum from science-types on this rather controversial subject. :-)
Location: God's Gift to Mankind for flying anything
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If an old "bunch of (old) gears", is now called a computer, is then a watch, like an 'old' analog wrist-watch, also a computer?
In any computer, if there is no input, then there is no output.
In a "modern" watch, there is really no input. Just a bunch of gears that ultimately "tell" time.
If that old computer was supposed to tell where the planets were located, could you then call it a computer or is it just a very clever way of a "show me where the planets are" device and NOT a computer?
The word "computer" hints at a function that calculates or computes a result...
Not a mechanical computer, more akin to a pocket orrery.
The original mechanical computing mechanisms did simple arithmetic. During the 1960's, kids could purchase plastic versions of Blaise Pascal's 1642 mechanical calculator to perform addition and subtraction.
If an old "bunch of (old) gears", is now called a computer, is then a watch, like an 'old' analog wrist-watch, also a computer?
In any computer, if there is no input, then there is no output.
In a "modern" watch, there is really no input. Just a bunch of gears that ultimately "tell" time.
If that old computer was supposed to tell where the planets were located, could you then call it a computer or is it just a very clever way of a "show me where the planets are" device and NOT a computer?
The word "computer" hints at a function that calculates or computes a result...
an abacus is a computer because it can store and retrieve information and it can add.
The WWII computer which decoded German messages was mostly bells & whistles(not really!), gears, pieces of wire and lights and was very effective in its job. So, often the input is a human turning a handle or rearranging the settings - as in an abacus. It doesn't matter what does the calculations to arrive at the answer. I reckon a computer is something which saves us brain work and does calculations quicker than we can do it ourselves.
There was a very good television program a couple of years ago on the Science Channel ("Mysteries of the Lost), and there have been others such as Nova on PBS, that chronicled the analysis of what the device was supposed to do. You can watch it here: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=333104437405084
The WWII computer which decoded German messages was mostly bells & whistles(not really!), gears, pieces of wire and lights and was very effective in its job. So, often the input is a human turning a handle or rearranging the settings - as in an abacus. It doesn't matter what does the calculations to arrive at the answer. I reckon a computer is something which saves us brain work and does calculations quicker than we can do it ourselves.
When I first started work at NASA as a co-op student in the mid-1960s, we used Friden and Marchant calculators - they were basically a bunch of gears and buttons. But was it a computer? Yes. They couldn't be programmed, but could certainly do arithmetic. Some of them would even extract a square root to about 12 decimal places, but it would take several seconds. The best "real" computer we had was an IBM 360, but those things got us to the moon and helped design the Saturn V. We got our first electronic calculator in the early 1970s, an HP that cost about $400 (a lot of money at the time - had to lock it up every night in a secure file cabinet).
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The best "real" computer we had was an IBM 360, but those things got us to the moon and helped design the Saturn V. We got our first electronic calculator in the early 1970s, an HP that cost about $400 (a lot of money at the time - had to lock it up every night in a secure file cabinet).
