FROM ANTIKYTHERA TO ZARKOV:
A TOUR OF HOW WE CAME TO BE HERE
The world of computers – we live in a world in which we use computers every day; many of us even carry powerful computers around in
our pockets everywhere we go. But how did we come to be here, in
this world of electronic brains?
WHEN'S THE NEXT ECLIPSE, SOCRATES?
It all started in ancient Greece...
Every school kid knows that the ancient Greeks were star-crazy. The
nighttime sky is filled with people and creatures from Greek myth: the
constellations and the brightest stars were all named by the Greeks,
named which we still use today. But what most people don't know is that
the ancient Greeks could calculate the positions of the stars and planets
by using the world's first computer.
It's true. The Antikythera mechanism was found in the remains of an ancient shipwreck at the start of the twentieth century. Constructed of metal in the first century B.C., the device has thirty gears and some cryptic
instructions written in Koine Greek. A mystery for over a century, the device's astronomical purpose (which included calculating the dates of solar
eclipses) wasn't determined until the early twenty-first century. Today the
mechanism is often referred to as the first analog (non-digital) computer.
CHARLES BABBAGE AND LADY ADA
If the Antikythera mechanism was, indeed, a computer, it took nineteen
hundred years for someone to try constructing another one. In the mid1800's, England's Charles Babbage went the ancient Greeks one better when he designed the first programmable computer. His first design
was called a “difference engine” and (had it been completed) would
have been able to perform simple mathematical calculations. His second,
more complex (and also unfinished), design was called an “analytical engine” and would have been the world's first fully programmable computer; in fact, the accomplished mathematician Lady Ada Lovelace (daughter of famed poet Lord Byron) wrote an actual working program for use by
the analytical engine. Babbage and Lady Ada even corresponded on the
feasibility of programming the analytical engine to play chess. In recent
years both of Babbage's engines have been successfully constructed
and operated according to his original plans. Today Charles Babbage is
known as the “father” of the computer, while Lady Ada is often hailed as
the first computer programmer.
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