Experts unravel secrets of ancient computer
Imagine tossing a top-notch laptop into the sea, leaving scientists from a foreign culture to scratch their heads over its corroded remains centuries later. A Roman shipmaster inadvertently did something just like it 2,000 years ago off southern Greece, experts said last week. The box-shaped mechanism the size of office paper and operated with a hand-crank could predict an eclipse to a precise hour on a specific day.
They claim to have identified a handful of puzzling metal scraps found in the wreck as the earliest known mechanical computing device that pinpointed astronomical events. Known as the Antikythera Mechanism from the island off which the Roman ship sank the assemblage of cogs and wheels looks like the innards of a very badly maintained grandfather clock.
Comments are closed.