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Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

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Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#21

Post by fho »

gus_massa wrote: post #2

In case you have not seen it, there is a very interesting video series by Clickspring about building an Antikythera Mechanism with tools that were abailable at that time. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZioPDnFPNsHnyxfygxA0... The tl;dw is that it was possible to build it with tools that were probably available, but some tools are specialized enough to guess that they had already build other similar devices.…

Did I miss that he finished the mechanism? From what I've seen he went into hiatus and has been only posting ClickSpring "clips" for a while now?

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#22

Post by rsynnott »

smitty1e wrote: post #3

"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.

There's nothing _particularly_ surprising about the Pyramids, though; they were fairly obviously possible at the time and made sense in context. The Antikythera device was more surprising; if nothing else, it's the oldest known example of clockwork in that part of the world, by _centuries_.

There's no magic here; it clearly did exist. But it's surprising that it did; it feels out of time in a way that most artifacts don't.

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#24

Post by stan_rogers »

gus_massa wrote: post #2

In case you have not seen it, there is a very interesting video series by Clickspring about building an Antikythera Mechanism with tools that were abailable at that time. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZioPDnFPNsHnyxfygxA0... The tl;dw is that it was possible to build it with tools that were probably available, but some tools are specialized enough to guess that they had already build other similar devices.…

That series still isn't over. It just got interrupted a couple of times. The first interruption was explained in Episode 10 - that was the discovery that the way one of the wheels was divided in the remaining teeth likely indicated that the mechanism was based on a lunar rather than a solar calendar, and that part needed to wait for the peer review and publication of a paper before the series could continue. The next interruption had more to do with Chris's real passion of watch and clock making - he had access to a couple of decorative engines (a straight-line engine and a rose engine), probably temporarily, since they would in no way both fit into the little closet he has for a shop, and he did some rather impressive guilloché and enamel work with those. When the series picks up (if it does), the hard parts are yet to come, like the planetary dial and its crapload of pointers.

One thing Chris has done that people like Michael Wright didn't was to assume that anyone who was building something like that, with its obvious signs of not being a rough prototype, would have made some sort of jig for some of the parts rather than, say, laboriously walking off tooth spacing for every single gear, and that some sort of lathe, which was known to exist and be used for wood from illustrations both contemporary with and far preceding the device, would have likely been used to make round things out of soft metal.

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#25

Post by hnmullany »

rozab wrote: post #11

Jonathan 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.…

Same way - the extended 3rd century crisis in the Roman Empire led to a loss of sculpting expertise. No art was commissioned for so long that skills weren't passed on.

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#26

Post by rsynnott »

rozab wrote: post #5
luma wrote: post #4

Earlier 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…

There are actually several descriptions of similar devices in the literature. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism#Similar_...

And the Antikythera mechanism gave a lot of credibility to those descriptions. Without it, they might well be dismissed as fantasy; Roman and Greek writers, even historians, were generally pretty credulous by modern standards and the literature contains references to all sorts of things which couldn't possibly have been true.

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#27

Post by api »

rozab wrote: post #11

Jonathan 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, and most of all WYSIWYG GUI design software that worked exceptionally well. We had this on 80286 CPUs with 1MiB of RAM and similarly tiny machines.

Today's desktop UIs are a fucking disaster on both the developer side and the user side.

For developers you have a choice between a hypertext language hacked endlessly into a UI and native UI tooling that's far less intuitive and much uglier than what we had back then. Compare the UI designer (not the language) in Visual Basic in the 1990s to today. You could not only design but data bind a complex app that looked decent in 30 minutes.

For users you have no consistency, no keyboard shortcuts (or different ones for every app), no help or help that only works online, etc.

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#28

Post by rsynnott »

nathias wrote: post #15

Technology can stay 'inert' even if it is invented, for example the Romans already knew steam machines but didn't find a use for them, probably because they had slaves to do all that cheaper. Until recently solar power tech was the same ...

This is a _bit_ of a myth; the main reason that Roman-era steam engines went nowhere was that they didn't have the metallurgy to make them practical. Like, they had _watermills_; the idea that they were uninterested in mechanical power because they had slaves doesn't really hold up.

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#29

Post by rsynnott »

wheelerof4te wrote: post #12

Just think abput all the knowledge that was lost over the centuries and millenia of human civilization. Who are we to think that our technology is the greatest and the most advanced on this planet? We have no conclusive evidence to claim such titles. Ancient people have drawings of strange creatures and devices that descend from the heavens. Even the Pyramids show signs of advanced engineering, such as deep tunnels a…

> Only couple of years earlier we thought to know everything about ancient Greece

I don't think any historian would claim that, or would ever have claimed that. Knowledge of the ancient world is extremely limited and patchy.

Re: Antikythera Mechanism: An ancient 'computer' that 'shouldn't exist' [video]

#30

Post by db48x »

fho wrote: post #21
gus_massa wrote: post #2

In case you have not seen it, there is a very interesting video series by Clickspring about building an Antikythera Mechanism with tools that were abailable at that time. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZioPDnFPNsHnyxfygxA0... The tl;dw is that it was possible to build it with tools that were probably available, but some tools are specialized enough to guess that they had already build other similar devices.…

Did I miss that he finished the mechanism? From what I've seen he went into hiatus and has been only posting ClickSpring "clips" for a while now?

He hasn’t completely finished his reconstruction, but he hasn’t entirely been on a hiatus either. He co–authored a paper on the calendar ring of the mechanism: https://bhi.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/BHI-Antikythera...

But he hasn’t made many videos the last year or two.

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