Ancient Greek computer?

[velvetpage]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/11/29/ugreek129.xml

Comments

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Ah, the good ol' Greek Clockwork Calculator, stock filler piece for 1970s "Believe or Not" type shows narrated by Leonard Nimoy and Arthur C. Clarke. People used to say it was a hoax, because they'd always talk about it at the same time as the Crystal Skull (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_skull#Mitchell-Hedges_skull), but I'm willing to bed the Greeks had a bunch of these calculator things.

[dornbeast.livejournal.com]

Wow. They solved the mystery.

I saw a piece on the History Channel about the Antikythera mechanism, but I didn't realize that they were close to being able to reconstruct it.

[dagoski.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of Civilization II. My hallmark for a good game was getting railroads before Christ. You have to set it to a pretty easy level for that to happen, but it was a cheap thrill. I'm not surprised by this kind of technology. You'd have a foundational genius in his shop and he'd pass his skills onto apprentices. One of them might also be a genius of the same caliber and would add his skill to his master's skill, producing devices like this along the way. But, what if he died young, didn't have worthy apprentices, or his whole shop got killed when a city was sacked? Poof. It's all gone. Without print and the institutions to preserve printed materials, knowledge would get lost, especially because craftsmen often considered their knowledge secret to be passed only to the worthy. T

'Course, I am not a real scholar so I may be full it.