Loading…
19
Serious question, why do people keep calling the Antikythera mechanism an ancient computer when it's clearly just an astronomy tool?
I keep seeing folks online say the Antikythera mechanism from around 100 BC was some kind of Greek laptop, and it bugs me. It was a hand cranked bronze gear device that tracked the sun, moon, and eclipses, not a machine that could run different programs. Calling it a computer makes people think the Greeks were doing something they weren't, and I think that stretches what we actually know from the wreck found near Antikythera in 1901. So is this just clickbait wording, or do some researchers really use the word computer on purpose?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
wood.faith6d ago
Yes! This drives me nuts too. I've seen people on youtube straight up call it a "2000 year old laptop" and it's like, no, it couldn't do anything but crank out one set of calculations for the sky. A computer runs different programs, that thing did one thing. I had the same thing happen with people calling Stonehenge an "ancient observatory" like it's some kind of high tech setup, when really we're just guessing what it was even for. Researchers do use the word computer for it but they mean it in a really narrow way, like how an abacus gets called a computer sometimes. The clickbait version just runs with it and makes the Greeks sound like they had laptops.
1