Oldest computer
Oldest computer
Someone hacked a pregnancy test to play doom. There used to be a Reddit sub /r/itrunsdoom for unconventional media to run doom on.
to clarify, this machine is way less impressive than what a lot of media claim it is. the greeks had hundreds of years of stargazing and records to figure out a model of the cosmos, and this is basically their whole model in a mechanism. unfortunately, at the time this thing was made, their model was pretty far off and they couldn't come up with a better one due to philosophical reasons (the earth is the center! the orbits of the planets must be some sort of perfect circles!).
anyway, this thing is somewhat impressive technically, but is really bad in terms of engineering:
- the teeth of the gears are triangular. there is a part of the mechanism that is super elaborate and calculates very precisely the motion of the moon and how it slows down and speeds up occasionally, but because of the triangular teeth, whether or not this actually worked is debatable.
- the mechanism used crown gears, which are pretty bad because they don't mesh well with the regular gears.
- some of the gears are put under a lot of strain, particularly gear d1, a small gear that sits at the end of the gear chain b2 -> c1 -> c2 -> d1 (which gets faster and faster)
- the mechanism has a lot of spacers soldered into place and rivets that were hammered in, making disassembly rather difficult. however some of the components are fastened in by pins.
- the main gear b1 (the large one with the cross spokes you see in the picture) was built in a very weird way: the gear itself is a ring, and the spokes are added on later, connected to the ring with dovetail joints which aren't the easiest thing to make when your level of tech is a file and some sandpaper. in fact, whoever made the mechanism probably screwed up one of the joints and had to rivet in an extra metal plate so it wouldn't fall off.
- the gear trains for the moon is built in a very weird way: first the main axis b drives 2 separate gear trains that pass through the main plate, only for one gear train to drive a turntable (e3 and e4) and the other to drive a shaft (e2 and e5) that goes through the center of the turntable. e5 will then drive a mechanism on the turntable which has an output shaft... that once again goes through the center of the turntable and the e2-e5 shaft (e1 and e6). then finally e1 drives b3, which drives a shaft that goes right through the center of the b axis. so now, you have 3 pairs of gears on the e axis whose shafts all go through each other like some matryoshka doll, as well as a hole right through the b axis to display the position of the moon.
- the metonic and saros spirals on the back need resetting once in a while, because the pointers move in spirals and can't automatically reset once they hit the end.
we knew that the greeks had a model of the cosmos before we discovered this (i think). we also knew, from greek records, that there were people discussing about "spheres" that tracked the positions of the planets, sun and moon as they moved through the sky. the main thing this mechanism shows is that the ancient greeks possibly pioneered complex gear mechanisms, and the knowledge was then passed on and on and went through times like the islamic golden age before coming back to europe in the form of clockwork and watchmaking.
can it play doom though?
if you will it hard enough it can even play crysis.
seriously, most of the hype for this thingy comes from some random documentary directors who thought the ancient greeks were as intelligent as monkeys and such. anyone who says this is an alien invention is basically insulting any intelligent life who has come far enough to go interstellar
If you can play doom on 16 billion crabs, you can play doom on this.
Sir please keep this USB stick away from the machine
Whispering into Radio We've got another nerd here!
Run doom on classic wooden abacus, i dare you
I can't right now, my abacus has a busted video card.
Eyes?
Didn't some biology nerds program a bunch of microbes to simulate Doom? Or am I too early on the timeline?
Technically, it was a display made from E. Coli cells, not actually programming the microbes to run it themselves...
... but yes, Doom has been used in a computer where the display was E. Coli.
To clarify a misconception, the pregnancy test was not running Doom. The guy who did it connected the test's display to an external device which was actually running the game, it was just displayed on the pregnancy test's screen.
So was she pregnant or not?
Yes. And it was a healthy demon.
The device was not running the game either, just a video of it - but people have connected this (very standard) display to Raspberry Pis and even any Linux machine over HDMI.
True but some of the hacks were nuts
They just don't want you to know that it contains a dozen meticulously drawn pictures of Susteros of Thebes' stylishly tiny penis.
Honestly if you can run Doom on it it’s like being able to make an Americano from an espresso or something. It’s very simple. I want to see you run Shrek 2 on it. That is true class.
We have a CT scan of the device. Now the question is, can we simulate it in the Doom engine?
No no, simulate it in Minecraft.
My hot take: it's not really a "computer" unless it's Turing-complete. The Antikythera mechanism is incredibly cool and all, but it can only perform a finite, fixed set of calculations and thus fails to meet that definition.
What's your take on the E6B flight computer?
Technically it's a computer because it can compute something, it's just not a universal computer.
Used to be? The sub no longer exists? I'd check, but I'm not at a computer and I dont use Reddit on my phone
"As is tradition" -- oh wait that's Blondihacks, sorry.
Wait so is that like basically different clock mechanisms hooked into each other?
the ancient greeks came up with their own model to track and predict
- the positions of the planets
- the position of the sun
- the position and phase of the moon
- solar and lunar eclipses
this machine is basically their mathematical models summarized into mechanical form
Clock? Ah, you must mean "time computer".