For anyone interested, this museum in Thessaloniki Greece: https://www.noesis.edu.gr/en/ancient-greek-technology/ has a lot of very interesting items. If you ever visit the city, worth going there. I was particularly impressed with Syracusia, the giant ship/castle designed by Archimedes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syracusia
Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]
41–50 of 277 posts
Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]
#42Jonathan Blow's talk 'Preventing the Collapse of Civilization' goes into detail about how technology can regress, with the Mechanism being one example. This kind of thing is far more common than we think, most would be surprised to learn that Ancient Greece had writing for about 600 years before forgetting it. There was no writing in Greece for over 400 years, until they adopted the Phoenician alphabet around 730 BC.…
I've been programming since... well... technically since I was a kid in the 1980s and professionally since 1998. I think several areas have regressed quite a bit. The biggest one by far is desktop GUI programming. From the late 1980s until the mid-2000s GUIs had all kinds of standardized visual cues, context sensitive help, UIs usable by both mouse and keyboard, standard interface designs across apps, data binding, a…
How comes that circa 2000 VB6 was the most hated and belittled programming language out there? I was there, I remember it. Now it's suddenly part of the golden age of desktop programming? I think you should put your nostalgia glasses off.
Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
All they're saying is that the technology represented in this device has no equivalent in the historical record anywhere near that time and that place. It's not to say that it literally cannot exist, rather, our historical understanding of these peoples is clearly incomplete. These are the sorts of findings that change our understanding of history which makes it pretty exciting to me. The Clickspring series on this m…
I've seen people claimed that, e.g. the polished granite columns common across European palaces and even some cathedrals, could not have been a) polished so well without laser technology, b) could not be moved and then erected without modern engine-powered equipment. So all of it was the work of ancient aliens or something, and the history as we're taught it is completely falsified, for some reason. Because obviously…
> Because obviously, if you can't imagine how to do something then it must be impossible.
Yep, this is known as the "argument from incredulity".
Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]
#44Jonathan Blow's talk 'Preventing the Collapse of Civilization' goes into detail about how technology can regress, with the Mechanism being one example. This kind of thing is far more common than we think, most would be surprised to learn that Ancient Greece had writing for about 600 years before forgetting it. There was no writing in Greece for over 400 years, until they adopted the Phoenician alphabet around 730 BC.…
I've been programming since... well... technically since I was a kid in the 1980s and professionally since 1998. I think several areas have regressed quite a bit. The biggest one by far is desktop GUI programming. From the late 1980s until the mid-2000s GUIs had all kinds of standardized visual cues, context sensitive help, UIs usable by both mouse and keyboard, standard interface designs across apps, data binding, a…
That's not a problem of the craft however, it's a problem of the culture.
We are perfectly capable of writing native GUIs, and we have powerful tools for it as well. QTDesigner comes to mind as a well known example.
The problem is, about 12 years ago, application design went through a gameification and "toy-i-fication" phase, from which it has yet to recover, because suddenly, everything had to look like it was designed for tablets or gaming consoles. Then the "javascript for everythiiiing!" happened, and suddenly the tools and workflows behind all the bloated, inefficient, low-information-density apps were swept into the desktop world.
But, since the modern definition of an "App" is basically everything that is displayed on a phone ever, and devices got so powerful that no matter how badly devs f* it up it still kinda-ish works (if we ignore the battery screaming for dear life), and this situation has generally been accepted.
Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been programming since... well... technically since I was a kid in the 1980s and professionally since 1998. I think several areas have regressed quite a bit. The biggest one by far is desktop GUI programming. From the late 1980s until the mid-2000s GUIs had all kinds of standardized visual cues, context sensitive help, UIs usable by both mouse and keyboard, standard interface designs across apps, data binding, a…
How comes that circa 2000 VB6 was the most hated and belittled programming language out there? I was there, I remember it. Now it's suddenly part of the golden age of desktop programming? I think you should put your nostalgia glasses off.
Because the language itself was terrible. The RAD tooling/UI designer was excellent. There was a product that had those but included a better language -- Borland's Delphi, but Borland and its successors squandered its initial success and didn't invest in improving it.
Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been programming since... well... technically since I was a kid in the 1980s and professionally since 1998. I think several areas have regressed quite a bit. The biggest one by far is desktop GUI programming. From the late 1980s until the mid-2000s GUIs had all kinds of standardized visual cues, context sensitive help, UIs usable by both mouse and keyboard, standard interface designs across apps, data binding, a…
How comes that circa 2000 VB6 was the most hated and belittled programming language out there? I was there, I remember it. Now it's suddenly part of the golden age of desktop programming? I think you should put your nostalgia glasses off.
VB was good at some things (e.g. UI design) and bad at others (e.g. doing complex computation).
Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been programming since... well... technically since I was a kid in the 1980s and professionally since 1998. I think several areas have regressed quite a bit. The biggest one by far is desktop GUI programming. From the late 1980s until the mid-2000s GUIs had all kinds of standardized visual cues, context sensitive help, UIs usable by both mouse and keyboard, standard interface designs across apps, data binding, a…
How comes that circa 2000 VB6 was the most hated and belittled programming language out there? I was there, I remember it. Now it's suddenly part of the golden age of desktop programming? I think you should put your nostalgia glasses off.
I think that the most hated part of VB6 was more the BASIC language rather than the GUI design part... but maybe I'm wrong.
Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]
#48"Simply shouldn't exist" Pyramids were wonders of the ancient world long before the Python web framework. The condescencion of the modern age toward those who came before use never ceases to amuse.
"The condescencion of the modern age toward those who came before use never ceases to amuse."
Well, it's also a bit sad testament to the fact that in general people have very little experience of how far they could go from starting from first principles, instead of just reading a single plausible answer from textbook.
A single human can be quite inventive and achieve quite a lot if they focus their energies.
The bayesian interpretation could be also that "it's pretty easy to progress this far in mechanical computation if you guess the correct route to take".
Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]
#49Jonathan Blow's talk 'Preventing the Collapse of Civilization' goes into detail about how technology can regress, with the Mechanism being one example. This kind of thing is far more common than we think, most would be surprised to learn that Ancient Greece had writing for about 600 years before forgetting it. There was no writing in Greece for over 400 years, until they adopted the Phoenician alphabet around 730 BC.…
I was hoping if I asked my other half who is an academic in the Classics he'd say this is untrue and I could then reply "well ackshully...". Alas it is true.
Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been programming since... well... technically since I was a kid in the 1980s and professionally since 1998. I think several areas have regressed quite a bit. The biggest one by far is desktop GUI programming. From the late 1980s until the mid-2000s GUIs had all kinds of standardized visual cues, context sensitive help, UIs usable by both mouse and keyboard, standard interface designs across apps, data binding, a…
How comes that circa 2000 VB6 was the most hated and belittled programming language out there? I was there, I remember it. Now it's suddenly part of the golden age of desktop programming? I think you should put your nostalgia glasses off.
The language was crap - the IDE/designer was excellent.
For me - the sweet-spot that I used for all of my own personal projects after outgrowing VB1-6 was... Borland Delphi.
The IDE/designer was at least as good as VB - but the Object Pascal language was so powerful. It was truely object-oriented and if one wanted, one could work at a high level of abstraction. Yet it could also natively drop-down to low-level Windows API's, and handle pointer-based work if necessary.
Unfortunately - for my professional career, Delphi never captured the large-scale Enterprise market - that went to .NET or Java and the rest is history...
(Occasionally I noodle about with FreePascal for the nostalgia factor)