Could the ancient Romans have built a digital computer?
1–10 of 145 posts
Re: Could the ancient Romans have built a digital computer?
#2This seems like a classic example of Betteridge's law of headlines...
Re: Could the ancient Romans have built a digital computer?
#3tldr: maybe, with a big if around powering it
Re: Could the ancient Romans have built a digital computer?
#4The Baghdad Battery may have been invented back then, but there is no evidence that it is used for anything more than electroplating in small scales.
I think this article is actually quite interesting and given a bit more, could make for very compelling alternate history
Re: Could the ancient Romans have built a digital computer?
#5This seems like a classic example of Betteridge's law of headlines...
Every time someone references Betteridge's 'law' of headlines, god kills a kitten.
Seriously, read the article. It's a tremendously interesting look at a hypothetical world in which the Romans decided to build a digital computer, and how they could've gone about it using the technology available to them. It doesn't need an answer.
Re: Could the ancient Romans have built a digital computer?
#6Romans didn't have a number zero.
Re: Could the ancient Romans have built a digital computer?
#7The somewhat recent 'Why didn't the Romans invent the internet?'
Re: Could the ancient Romans have built a digital computer?
#8This seems like a classic example of Betteridge's law of headlines...
Every time someone references Betteridge's 'law' of headlines, god kills a kitten. Seriously, read the article. It's a tremendously interesting look at a hypothetical world in which the Romans decided to build a digital computer, and how they could've gone about it using the technology available to them. It doesn't need an answer.
Thank you.
The other projects on his page are also fascinating.
Re: Could the ancient Romans have built a digital computer?
#9I think that mechanical computers are dismissed too quickly. Babbage was a perfectionist, and his machines were crippled by the reliance on decimal numbers. Konrad Zuse constructed his Z1[1] singlehandedly over a period of several years, based on a binary design. While the Z1 was only Turing Complete by technicality (it had the same instruction set as the relay-based Z3[2]) and it was fairly unreliable, it could have been built with more primitive technology and paved the way for significant improvements.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_(computer)
[2] http://www.zib.de/zuse/Inhalt/Kommentare/Html/0684/universal2.htmlRe: Could the ancient Romans have built a digital computer?
#10The problem really is in defining a computer. The first mechanical computer was not designed by Charles Babbage. Some thing like a clock/wrist watch is a mechanical computer. A marine chronometer like this(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_chronometer) is an advanced mechanical computer. The marine chronometer of the 17th century in our terms was basically a GPS device of that era.
Think of it that way. How do you think future generations hundreds of years now will look at our server farms. I bet our server farms won't even fall in their definition of a computer(or whatever term used to define a computer at their time).