The World's First Computer May Have Been Used To Tell Fortunes [Engraved text translation]

smithsonianmag ^

[BenLurkin]

ping

[Red Badger]

Antikythera mechanism PinGGG!..................

[Fido969]

[pepsionice]

I sat in an Athens, Greece museum last year and admired the object and the data around it.

The thing is....you sit down after a while and start asking yourself questions about the gearwheel, the amount of data being manipulated, and how smart the guy was to build it, and the guy was who carried it around with himself.

It’s a tremendous amount of knowledge that this little box has within itself. If you walked into some university with a hundred clever astronomical students and a hundred engineering students....giving them the task to build such a device....with no computers. I think they’d all just grin and walk away. They would consider it impossible. So, the question is...how did this engineer design it? And is there a possibility that others exist in today’s world....in private collections?

[Red Badger]

Whoever made it and for whatever reason, it had to have been very expensive! It would be very expensive even today to re-manufacture. 3D printing might make it a little more economical. But the real amazing thing is that its maker had to have precise knowledge of gears and ratios as well as planetary and astronomical movements........................

[null and void]

Beat me to it. GMTA

[GreyFriar]

Computer for astrology.

[WKUHilltopper]

The first message recovered in the hard drive was “Beware of Y1K...we’re all gonna die.”

[bioqubit]

a philosopher’s stone for soothsaying

[wally_bert]

Some kind of message from one incarnation of Dr. Who to one of his other selves?

[BenLurkin]

“Riv r So g is a Dal k”

[ml/nj]

Reminds me of a time at one of the Massachusetts Fairs (Northhampton, I think) where a friend and I came upon a guy who was using one of those old IBM card sorters to "tell fortunes." We both broke out into laughter when we saw this, and the guy didn't take too kindly to us. "You have your business. I've got mine. Go away," he said, or something to that effect.

ML/NJ

[CurlyDave]

...It’s a tremendous amount of knowledge that this little box has within itself. If you walked into some university with a hundred clever astronomical students and a hundred engineering students....giving them the task to build such a device....with no computers. I think they’d all just grin and walk away. They would consider it impossible. So, the question is...how did this engineer design it? And is there a possibility that others exist in today’s world....in private collections?

I suspect that this was not a one-off. There was probably some kind of small industry that made these things and they evolved over the years.

Think about clocks, electric drills, kitchen appliances, etc. These have evolved in our society and are common, but how many would be left in a few thousand years? I wonder what they were called back then and if there are any references to them in surviving literature? There is just so much information that has been lost.

[zot]

Very interesting. It must have been based on the written records of very long-term observations made with a high degree of precision. This indicates that there was at least one observatory with precision instruments like transits, and the library of an organization that endured over many generations. The Magi would be a likely candidate, but the inscriptions are in Greek.

[dfwgator]

BS! Everybody knows the first computer was used to watch porn.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks BenLurkin and Red Badger.

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[wildbill]

I understand the last recorded fortune read:

I see a long sea voyage in your future.

[BenLurkin]

Or to quote an old comedy routine from (the now disgraced) Bill Cosby...

“How long can you tread water?”

[SunkenCiv]

Hey, if it had said "short" instead of "long", he'd never have got into the boat. ;') I've come to the uneducated conclusion that the mechanism was part of a load of salvage (junk) metal headed for recycling.