2,000 year old 'computer' discovered:

[Mommalina]

2,000 year old 'computer' discovered:

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/2000-year-old-computer-discovered/

 

Using robots, underwater iPads, 3D printing, and other new tech, scientists are discovering shipwrecks that are rewriting our history. Read the inside story of the Antikythera and two other breakthrough explorations.

 

Under oceans across the world, hundreds of shipwrecks lie silent and forgotten. Having set sail to discover, trade, or wage war, the boats never reached safe harbour and exist now as time capsules beneath the waves.

 

When they took to the seas, some of these vessels were the state of the art, laden with some of the most advanced technology of their era. Now, thanks to the most advanced tech of our time, some long-sought wrecks are finally being found and explored for the first time.

 

TechRepublic talked to the teams behind some of the most high-profile shipwrecks to be discovered in recent years to find out how they've located the ships and uncovered their secrets—including a 2,000 year old device that may have been the world's first computer.

The Antikythera

If you thought the computer era started with the Colussus, or even with Babbage's designs, you'd be wrong. The advent of computing began before the birth of Christ, with a small bronze mechanism that was lost under the sea off Crete for over a thousand years.

 

Thought to have been built at the end of the second century BCE, the Antikythera mechanism is considered the first programmable computer. Thanks to an intricate series of gears and dials, the mechanism could be used as a calendar, to track the phases of the moon, and to predict eclipses. It's an object out of time: no other artefact as complex was built during the thousand years after the mechanism's creation—that we know of.

 

The Antikythera mechanism was named after the shipwreck on which it was discovered. Having sunk to the bottom of the sea in the first century BCE taking the mechanism with it, the shipwreck lay undisturbed until 1900, when a group of Greek sponge divers discovered it and began bringing its treasures to the surface.

 

Continued here: http://www.techrepublic.com/article/2000-year-old-computer-discovered/

[allheart55 Cindy E]

This was a fascinating article! Thanks, Lina.