The Scientific
American India issue of December 2009 had an interesting article titled Decoding an Ancient Computer (preview it here).
It spoke about an underwater discovery of a
ship wreck which included, besides glassware, pottery & jewelry, a fragile
device which later turned out to have within its innards gear wheels with
teeth.
This device was named the Antikythera mechanism as it was discovered in
the sea off the Antikythera island near the Greece mainland. Using
sophisticated modern technology, a team of historians, imaging experts &
astronomers were able to see the mechanism deep within the device. The device
was even reconstructed (see image below) & it was discovered to have been a calculator used
to calculate the dates of eclipses & track dates of major events.
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| Reconstructed Antikythera (image courtesy Scientific American India issue) |
The significance of discovering the
Antikythera mechanism is phenomenal: it meant that the people of ancient Greece had
technological know-how & not just mechanical knowledge of gears. That ancient
device was as close to being a computing device as possibly could ever be!
Coming to the present era, the credit for the
very first computing device goes to Charles Babbage. He designed what was
called a difference engine for crunching numbers. Read about it and about the interesting later development of computers here).
Do you even remember the existence of a
floppy & floppy drives? These have long since become defunct. We now use pen
drives, CDs and external hard drives to save our work – and, oh, yes, let’s not
forget cloud computing!
See the images below and recall all those devices:
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| Floppies |
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| Floppy Drive |
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| Floppy Box |
I am sure very few of you have these today and if at all, are probably using a floppy as a tea coaster and the box as a pen stand!
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