Highlights
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2024-11-23 14:10 We may concede that the history of the machines on our laps and in our pockets is perhaps as ancient as the vacuum tubes that perform calculations for Colossus.
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2024-11-23 14:11 Our journey back in time begins in 1901, when sponge divers discovered a shipwreck off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera.
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2024-11-23 14:13 In 2005, a team at Cardiff University began using non invasive 3D scanning techniques and custom internal X ray tomography to decipher the Greek inscriptions on all of those fragments. 120 years after its discovery, there is now general consensus that the device is a hand powered orrery, a model of the solar system that was used to predict celestial movements.
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2024-11-23 14:13 And what has come to be known as the Antikythera mechanism is the oldest known example in the world of an analog computer. It is truly astonishing and we now know that it had at least 37 meshing bronze gears for predicting the movements of the sun and the moon through the zodiac years in advance, along with eclipses and the cycles of the Panhellenic athletic games like the Olympiad.
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2024-11-27 10:16 So in Cicero’s political work, the Republic, written in the middle of the 1st century BCE, Phylus, one of the participants in an imagined dialogue Says I remember that Gaius Sulpicius Gallus, being by chance in the house of Marcellus, Claudius Marcellus ordered a sphere to be placed before him, which the ancestor of Marcellus had taken from the conquered Syracusans, and it was the only thing he had kept for himself among such great spoils. I had heard a great deal of this sphere on account of the fame of Archimedes, but I did not admire the construction of it so much. For another, which Archimedes also had made, and which the same Marcellus had placed in the Temple of Virtue, was more elegant and more remarkable. The mechanism of this sphere on which the motions of the sun, moon and those five stars which are called wandering and irregular are shown, and these could not be illustrated on that solid sphere.
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2024-11-24 13:28 They were human beings, mathematicians who performed calculations on which countries economies relied. And in fact, the first recorded use of the word computer in 1613 by the Jacobean poet Richard Braithwaite, was in reference to a person, someone he described as the best arithmetician that ever Breathed by the 18th century, a network of human computers overseen by the astronomer Royle was engaged in production of the Nautical Almanac astronomical tables that sailors used to find their latitude and longitude at sea.
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2024-11-24 13:30 This in turn resulted in loss of livelihood for the human computers, including Mary Edwards, the only female computer in the network.
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2024-11-24 13:35 As exquisitely illustrated here, power loom weaving was a binary on off system in widespread use 150 years before electronic computing. When a horizontal weft thread passes over the vertical warp threads, it creates a visible stitch in the cloth.
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2024-11-24 15:16 But for now, I am merely going to restate that curious and somewhat astonishing fact that in the 19th century there was a European government leader who was a computer geek. And I am using the word geek in the most positive sense.
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2024-11-27 10:17 She’s also a poster girl of steampunk, and that’s a term I’ve used a couple of times. It deserves unpacking, so let’s take a brief detour for it. The term steampunk was first coined in the 1980s to denote a subgenre of science fiction that was heavily influenced by the scientific romances of Jules Verne, H.G. wells, and others, and not least in its preoccupations with virtual history and alternative realities. But since then, steampunk has very much left the page. It’s evolved into an alt Victorian techno mechanical aesthetic.
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2024-11-27 10:18 I must confess I am straying very much into 20th century history here, I couldn’t possibly mention Kobold without at least a passing nod to Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, here signing autographs for adoring computer science students. When she retired in 1986 at the age of 79, she was the oldest serving officer in the US Armed Forces. Her contribution includes, but is certainly not confined to writing Flowmatic, the first compiler program that replaced mathematical notation with the English language, enabling people who weren’t mathematicians to write computer code and paving the way for more accessible form formats like cobol. So whether steam driven or powered by electricity, women in both weaving and computing work wrote millions of lines of code.
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2024-11-24 15:40 At times, machines did indeed replace certain human functions, and in response, humankind adapted, for example, by ceasing to be computers and become computer programmers instead.