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I think that mechanical computers are dismissed too quickly. Babbage was a perfectionist, and his machines were crippled by the reliance on decimal numbers. Kon

I think that mechanical computers are dismissed too quickly. Babbage was a perfectionist, and his machines were crippled by the reliance on decimal numbers. Konrad Zuse constructed his Z1[1] singlehandedly over a period of several years, based on a binary design. While the Z1 was only Turing Complete by technicality (it had the same instruction set as the relay-based Z3[2]) and it was fairly unreliable, it could have been built with more primitive technology and paved the way for significant improvements. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_(computer) [2] http://www.zib.de/zuse/Inhalt/Kommentare/Html/0684/universal2.html

themgt 14y ago
Yeah, I think this is an interesting idea, but it sort of inverts causality in a way. Could we have gone to the moon without a computer? To what extent are our advances since the advent of computation a result of computation itself? Put another way, if the Romans had invented a computer, would they have had our level of technology maybe just 100-200 years later?
- dublinben 14y ago
  It's likely that the greater forces responsible for the downfall of the Roman Empire would have happened regardless of what advanced technology they might have developed.
  - swombat 14y ago
    Actually, from what I understood from listing to a TTC lecture series about this, the "decline and fall" of the roman empire is somewhat of a fiction, in that it wasn't a brutal event, more of a long slow disintegration over the span of a thousand years. To give some sense of perspective, that's 3 times longer than the US has existed, and people have been clamouring that the US is in decline for the last 50 years. What happened is that regions progressively became more independent and broke off from the central hegemony of Rome and then Byzantium. It took until the 1400s for that last official centre of Roman power to dwindle, and even through to today, Rome has maintained a huge influence on the rest of the world through the Roman Catholic Church. So, rather than falling down, the Roman Empire slowly but surely transformed into something else. Arguably, we (western civilisation) are the direct descendants of the Greco-Roman Civilisation, and so one could make a (somewhat strained) argument that the Roman Empire is alive and well today, just in a different, more modern form, that has undergone 2000 years of evolution. What to make of this myth of the downfall of the Roman Empire, the Dark Ages, etc? Well, according to that lecture series, this was largely a myth concocted during the Enlightenment to position it in history. The Renaissance needed to frame itself as a major cultural change, so it helped to frame history as "the Classical period, the Dark Ages, and now the Renaissance" - and draw on a fine period of history to support all the new ideas and revolutions brewing (i.e. "things were good back in Roman times, then things were really bad because of the Church, and now things are better again because we're standing up to the Church"). For the people living through the supposed transition between the Classical Period and the Dark Ages, though, apparently, there was no such stark difference.
    - lifeisstillgood 14y ago
      Kind of but not entirely true - I will defer to real historians but roughly it breaks down like this 100 - 180 AD : golden age of emperors, what we think of when we think Rome 200-350 : serious decline and infighting, split into four regions, during this period attempts to enforce price controls to stem inflation. Rome itself stopped being political centre 350-400 Constantine recovery (unites to one region again - one empire of three parts, one god of three parts, one emperor - gettit?) 400 + : total collapse of western empire - communications fail, smaller regions contest with each other, and inflation wrecks the value of economies as trade collapses. Eastern empire carries on with vastly reduced army and trade links to Persia. This really was a dark ages - impoverished, illiterate, backwards looking and lacking trade with most of the world. There was no single definition of dark AGRs - mostly because there are few ways to be right and many ways to be wrong In short, the glory of empire did not last as long as everyone thinks - mostly Rome was a trade agreement that everyone else was keeping up in lieu of anything better.
      - swombat 14y ago
        Well, that's the thing. Yes, the central control collapsed (though I still wouldn't underestimate the influence of the Church, which effectively controlled kings' actions through the threat of excommunication). However, on a local basis, there was no such great disaster, just a long slow change. And it was not really a dark age. As I said in my previous post, the dark age narrative is largely an invention of the 17th-18th century. What actually happened in that period was the development of a whole lot of great stuff like city states, art, commerce, banking, kingdoms, navigation tools (compass), military inventions (crossbows, guns), hourglasses, farming technology (ploughing), metallurgy, optics (eyeglasses!), mechanical clocks, textile technology (spinning wheel), the printing press, windmills, glassmaking... For the people living in those times, it probably didn't feel anything like a "dark age". Just a fairly smooth progression upwards, with the usual ups and downs of wars, plagues and other disasters that are hardly confined to the middle ages. I know the narrative of "here's the awesome roman empire, and now the church takes over and you have the dark ages, and now reason comes back in the form of the renaissance" is very compelling, particularly if you don't like the church very much, but it is just a narrative, and is not very well supported with facts.
  - lifeisstillgood 14y ago
    Inflation mostly. Kind of ominous isn't it?
- raverbashing 14y ago
  I think the cross-feeding between technologies cannot be underestimated You need metallurgy to get better at metallurgy (so you can build tools to build better tools, etc) At the same time, you need metallurgy to build delicate electronic circuits: tools, terminals, etc, be that a transistor or a relay or a tube
  - dmoo 14y ago
    Slight tangent, but there is a marvelous series about this crossfeeding of technologies called 'Connections' by James Burke. Its old but still great to watch. http://www.youtube.com/user/JamesBurkeConnection?feature=watch http://www.youtube.com/user/JamesBurkeConnection?feature=wat... I can't recommend it highly enough, its worth taking the time to start at series one.
    - raverbashing 14y ago
      Oh, of course I remember it. It was also a column on SciAm But yeah, I've watched a couple of episodes, and it's very good.
    - sageikosa 14y ago
      Also by Burke, "The Day the Universe Changed", Netflix had/has it through their DVD service a few years back. In that series he goes into the history of the ideas that make our modern world possible. The idea being that the day the universe changes is the day you start looking at it differently.
      - krallja 14y ago
        It's also available on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9ED93A671A5282EA http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9ED93A671A5282EA

themgt 14y ago

Yeah, I think this is an interesting idea, but it sort of inverts causality in a way. Could we have gone to the moon without a computer? To what extent are our advances since the advent of computation a result of computation itself? Put another way, if the Romans had invented a computer, would they have had our level of technology maybe just 100-200 years later?

dublinben 14y ago
It's likely that the greater forces responsible for the downfall of the Roman Empire would have happened regardless of what advanced technology they might have developed.
- swombat 14y ago
  Actually, from what I understood from listing to a TTC lecture series about this, the "decline and fall" of the roman empire is somewhat of a fiction, in that it wasn't a brutal event, more of a long slow disintegration over the span of a thousand years. To give some sense of perspective, that's 3 times longer than the US has existed, and people have been clamouring that the US is in decline for the last 50 years. What happened is that regions progressively became more independent and broke off from the central hegemony of Rome and then Byzantium. It took until the 1400s for that last official centre of Roman power to dwindle, and even through to today, Rome has maintained a huge influence on the rest of the world through the Roman Catholic Church. So, rather than falling down, the Roman Empire slowly but surely transformed into something else. Arguably, we (western civilisation) are the direct descendants of the Greco-Roman Civilisation, and so one could make a (somewhat strained) argument that the Roman Empire is alive and well today, just in a different, more modern form, that has undergone 2000 years of evolution. What to make of this myth of the downfall of the Roman Empire, the Dark Ages, etc? Well, according to that lecture series, this was largely a myth concocted during the Enlightenment to position it in history. The Renaissance needed to frame itself as a major cultural change, so it helped to frame history as "the Classical period, the Dark Ages, and now the Renaissance" - and draw on a fine period of history to support all the new ideas and revolutions brewing (i.e. "things were good back in Roman times, then things were really bad because of the Church, and now things are better again because we're standing up to the Church"). For the people living through the supposed transition between the Classical Period and the Dark Ages, though, apparently, there was no such stark difference.
  - lifeisstillgood 14y ago
    Kind of but not entirely true - I will defer to real historians but roughly it breaks down like this 100 - 180 AD : golden age of emperors, what we think of when we think Rome 200-350 : serious decline and infighting, split into four regions, during this period attempts to enforce price controls to stem inflation. Rome itself stopped being political centre 350-400 Constantine recovery (unites to one region again - one empire of three parts, one god of three parts, one emperor - gettit?) 400 + : total collapse of western empire - communications fail, smaller regions contest with each other, and inflation wrecks the value of economies as trade collapses. Eastern empire carries on with vastly reduced army and trade links to Persia. This really was a dark ages - impoverished, illiterate, backwards looking and lacking trade with most of the world. There was no single definition of dark AGRs - mostly because there are few ways to be right and many ways to be wrong In short, the glory of empire did not last as long as everyone thinks - mostly Rome was a trade agreement that everyone else was keeping up in lieu of anything better.
    - swombat 14y ago
      Well, that's the thing. Yes, the central control collapsed (though I still wouldn't underestimate the influence of the Church, which effectively controlled kings' actions through the threat of excommunication). However, on a local basis, there was no such great disaster, just a long slow change. And it was not really a dark age. As I said in my previous post, the dark age narrative is largely an invention of the 17th-18th century. What actually happened in that period was the development of a whole lot of great stuff like city states, art, commerce, banking, kingdoms, navigation tools (compass), military inventions (crossbows, guns), hourglasses, farming technology (ploughing), metallurgy, optics (eyeglasses!), mechanical clocks, textile technology (spinning wheel), the printing press, windmills, glassmaking... For the people living in those times, it probably didn't feel anything like a "dark age". Just a fairly smooth progression upwards, with the usual ups and downs of wars, plagues and other disasters that are hardly confined to the middle ages. I know the narrative of "here's the awesome roman empire, and now the church takes over and you have the dark ages, and now reason comes back in the form of the renaissance" is very compelling, particularly if you don't like the church very much, but it is just a narrative, and is not very well supported with facts.
- lifeisstillgood 14y ago
  Inflation mostly. Kind of ominous isn't it?
raverbashing 14y ago
I think the cross-feeding between technologies cannot be underestimated You need metallurgy to get better at metallurgy (so you can build tools to build better tools, etc) At the same time, you need metallurgy to build delicate electronic circuits: tools, terminals, etc, be that a transistor or a relay or a tube
- dmoo 14y ago
  Slight tangent, but there is a marvelous series about this crossfeeding of technologies called 'Connections' by James Burke. Its old but still great to watch. http://www.youtube.com/user/JamesBurkeConnection?feature=watch http://www.youtube.com/user/JamesBurkeConnection?feature=wat... I can't recommend it highly enough, its worth taking the time to start at series one.
  - raverbashing 14y ago
    Oh, of course I remember it. It was also a column on SciAm But yeah, I've watched a couple of episodes, and it's very good.
  - sageikosa 14y ago
    Also by Burke, "The Day the Universe Changed", Netflix had/has it through their DVD service a few years back. In that series he goes into the history of the ideas that make our modern world possible. The idea being that the day the universe changes is the day you start looking at it differently.
    - krallja 14y ago
      It's also available on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9ED93A671A5282EA http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9ED93A671A5282EA