> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6191462.stm
It says: > The delicate workings at the heart of > a 2,000-year-old analogue computer... > > ... the new studies ... suggest it would > have been constructed around 100-150 BC... So: The Antikythera findings are the same sort of thing that was reported a few years earlier in other archeological studies. As it was a device for computing, it seems appropriate to call it a "computer". It was much closer to 2000 than to 3000 year ago. While these recent studies are interesting, it has been pretty obvious for a long time that fairly sophisticated equipment was used in the "hellenistic" period, in an area extending from Greece to Sicily (e.g. Archimedes) and, of course, including "ptolemaic" Egypt. So there isn't any "new" discovery dating the whole thing 800 or 900 years earlier... simply a reporter or editor made a gross mistake in arithmetic? There is a lot of such nonsense around, but it's peculiar to see it happen when discussing science and computing... Giancarlo (Giancarlo Livraghi [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://gandalf.it)
