Posted on 05/02/2009 6:23:53 PM PDT by Maelstorm
Analog computers are pretty fast.
I once toured a battleship and the analog computers (gears) were unbelievable. When the USS Pennsylvania was rebuilt in the’80s, they left the gear computers alone. Could not be improved upon at that time.
The divers also found a copy of Windows B.C.
You think it may have been infected with a Trojan Horse?
Nikola Tesla designed and built the first electronic binary logic gate circuits...these logic circuits were the first step toward the modern binary digital computers.
“After World War II when computer hardware manufacturers attempted to patent digital logic gates in general, the U.S. Patent Office asserted Tesla’s turn-of-the-century priority in their electrical implementation. These same patents also describe essential features of the spread-spectrum wireless communications techniques known as frequency-hopping and frequency-division multiplexing.”
Thats pretty good because the USS Pennsylvania has been underwater since 1948!
I remember reading about the Antikythera mechanism in a “Ripley’s Believe It Or Not” back when I was a kid in the 50’s.
There was a program on one of the science channels a year or so back about the mechanism which they pretty much understand now. It was even more complex than originally thought.
I believe some guy has even made a working copy of it.
Yep that is a picture of it. I just watched something about it last night on the History channel. It is horrible that the library of Alexandria was lost.
Ping!
“Nikola Tesla designed and built the first electronic binary logic gate circuits...these logic circuits were the first step toward the modern binary digital computers.
“After World War II when computer hardware manufacturers attempted to patent digital logic gates in general, the U.S. Patent Office asserted Tesla’s turn-of-the-century priority in their electrical implementation. These same patents also describe essential features of the spread-spectrum wireless communications techniques known as frequency-hopping and frequency-division multiplexing.”
Thank you ,My Dad was a fan of his.
I saw it in Athens ten years ago, before the recent reconstruction. It’s an amazingly sophisticated device for its time. The lettering on it looks stamped, almost machined but then they had no machine tools then, so whoever the craftsman was he must have been very skilled at.
As for the island of Antikythera, it was virtually depopulated during the Greek Civil War between the communists and nationalists in the late 1940s - another place where the “Cold War” wasn’t very cold. When I was there in 1999 there were only about 30 fisherman living on the island. The rest had either killed one another or moved to or Australia. It did have a cell site, most Greek islands do, so GSM coverage was good.
Hipparchus is credited with discovering precession. We were just discussing that on another thread:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1844629/posts
Strangest part of this story?
Three pimply undergrads from Carnegie-Mellon are actually running Linux on this thing.
Rim Shot!
She's also much easier to look at than Tesla.
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