Scientists continue troubleshooting 2,000-year-old computer

If Archimedes had a laptop, would he ever have gotten around to calculating pi? If he’d been born 2,500 years later, I can imagine him minimizing Minesweeper to pull up a Google doc of equations every time the teacher walked by. Dude would’ve loved sudoku. A century after Archimedes, circa 100 BC, the ancient Greeks actually did have small computers, though they weren’t yet good at distracting from the task at hand. They were analog computers like the Antikythera mechanism, built for specific calculation. The Antikythera mechanism may well be the first computer ever made, and despite more than 100 years of study since it was uncovered in a shipwreck in 1901, scholars are still trying to figure out exactly how it worked. It probably hasn’t helped that the remains look about as crusty as a CPU cooler that hasn’t been cleaned since Quake was new.

The Antikythera mechanism is thought to be an ancient Greek astronomical calculator, meant to show the movements of the planets using a very complex series of interlocking gears. Unlike the early digital computers of the 20th century, it was also remarkably compact, at around a foot tall.

It took decades of study to figure out what the Antikythera mechanism was and what it did, because few of the pieces survive. But no model has actually been able to match a theoretical mechanical design with the actual known movements of the planets. At least, until now.

Somehow, from the badly corroded remains of the computer, researchers have been able to come up with what they believe is an accurate working model of the Antikythera mechanism in its original form, by matching the inscriptions on the front of the device that specified how it was meant to work far more closely than any previous effort.

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