[Freddy]

The Antikythera Mechanism was always a favourite of mine. When I was a child I saw this on Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World (great program btw) and at the time it was still something of a mystery. It's only in recent times that they managed to reconstruct it and find out what it actually did. Amazing stuff and I am sure there would be other mechanisms around that did different or similar things.

We do tend to think of the technological age as being just about silicon, so I think it was a good idea to bring things like this up 8pla.net, because like you say technology is older than that.

[Art]

Yeah but they never did find the batteries for it!

[Freddy]

Hold on Art !

I think there was an ancient battery discovered somewhere. I'll try to find out something about it later. I believe it was like the first batteries and used large metal rings on a central pillar or something like that.

[8pla.net]

I think you may be thinking of the Baghdad Battery, Freddy.

The latest find on the mechanism is that it uses Babylonian arithmetic rather than Greek trigonometry which makes it older than previously estimated. This opens up the possibility that Archimedes may have been its creator.

[Freddy]

Yep that's what I was thinking of. I looked it up on Wikipedia, apparently it's widely rejected as being a battery. Oh well.

[8pla.net]

Hmm, reject theories of the technologies from 250BC?

I think a better source may be the TV show "MythBusters"
which got about five volts out of some ancient battery
replicas they built based on this 250BC technology.

Oh, and I meant to tie ancient technology back to this topic of
Stephen Hawking.  If computers are thousands of years old,
and A.I. is computer based, then in theory it may have taken
A.I.  thousands of years to progress to where it is now. 

What do you think of my theory?
 

[Art]

About as much as a caveman thought a rock tumbling down a hill during a quake was actually a wheel in disguise!

The ancients were lucky if they could Spell A.I. let alone conceptualize anything of the sort regarding their primitive computing device, and we're still not sure just what, if anything, it was capable of computing.

Just my $.02 as that was just a tad before my time.

[Freddy]

I concur with how effective the technology might have been back then, but everything has to start somewhere.

Art I thought you went back at least as far as the wheel

[Art]

Actually Freddy, I am a close second to dirt! 

Thanks, you young whippersnapper!! Keep it up!

[squarebear]

I was under the impression that Art was so old, when he was at school, there was no history class

(just kidding! )

[Art]

Haha! Good one Steve!!

OK... Just to let you all know...

I'm so old that when I was a kid, rainbows were in Black and White!!

[Freddy]