Re: [OT] Antikythera mechanism [was Re: Do have programs have poor documentation?]
On Sunday 01 January 2017 14:54:09 Joel Rees wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 31, 2016 at 11:11 AM, Miles Fidelman
>
> <mfidelman@meetinghouse.net> wrote:
> > On 12/30/16 7:07 PM, deloptes wrote:
No, I wrote that.
> >>> In what way is the Antikythera mechanism not a computer? And where did
> >>> your 400 years come from?
>
> Without a functioning Antikythera mechanism, we really can't answer
> that question in a useful manner. However, I could guess that I could
> not program that machine with anything that looks like a full C
> compiler.
So something that can't be programmed with anything that looks like a full C
compiler is not a computer??? So Colossus was not a computer?? :-)
C itself, of course, is MUCH later than Colossus,
<quote> C was originally developed by Dennis Ritchie between 1969 and 1973 at
Bell Labs, </quote>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_(programming_language)
<quote>
Colossus was a set of computers developed by British codebreakers in
1943-1945 .... The prototype, Colossus Mark 1, was shown to be working in
December 1943
</quote>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer
but I don't think that Colossus could compile with anything. It had to be
directly programmed.
Lisi
> (Guess. For all we know, there were nanotech mechanical CPUs in the
> thing before the seawater made it non-functional.)
>
> Subset C, maybe. The difference is important.
>
> >> I understand what you mean, but it was in the last 400y that this
> >> machine took shape. In fact it was Turing that defined it. But he would
> >> not be able
> >> to define it if it was not the mathematicians before him. I agree with
> >> you as well, we could go to the roots of mathematics, however even if
> >> the definition of such a machine was so old, it wouldn't be possible to
> >> build it without the technical advantage, so ... I still think my
> >> statement is true. You can argue as long as you will.
> >
> > Well, you kind of forget:
> > Joseph Jacquard (and maybe Basile Bouchon)
> > not to mention Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelance
> > Alonzo Church.
> > And of course, John von Neumann (if you want to talk actual hardware
> > architecture)
>
> Interesting thing about the siggie and the above.
>
> > --
> > In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
> > In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
>
> Intel really still wants us to believe that the 8086, because it was
> Turing complete -- other than the memory limitation (cough) -- was
> equivalent to the 68000. Nobody in their right mind used an 8086 to
> control an engine, however. (But we do now use subsets of the Power PC
> architecture and variations of the SH architecture.)
>
> You can program PLAs in something that looks like a subset of C, but
> it's not the same.
>
> You can construct a CPU with a PLA, but you can get much more energy
> efficiency and much better CPU speed by laying out the various CPU
> parts as dedicated blocks of logic.
>
> On the converse, simulating a switch grid with a CPU introduces
> serious inefficiencies, as well.
>
> Different classes of complexity. Programming, but not the same kind of
> programs.
>
> The info system is another example. Very powerful, but I didn't want
> to have to learn the info system just to wade through the info info
> pages. It was very intuitive for someone who already had certain
> keyboard habits, but not for the rest of us. Keyboard macros are not
> the same thing as Forth or LISP primitives or M4 or cpp macrose.
>
> html is a bit less obtuse than info, less concise, and a shallower
> learning curve.
>
> And plain text coupled with the apropos command (man -k), with the
> in-page search function, still get me a lot farther into something
> new, quicker, than info files. Much less keyboard dancing.
>
> My personal vote for the original topic is man 7, as someone else
> mentioned. (Yes, the man pages did, from back in the system 6 days,
> even, include a _little_ bit of tutorial.)
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