Gizmodo reports: Discovered in an ancient shipwreck near Crete in 1901, the freakishly advanced Antikythera Mechanism has been called the world’s first computer. A decades-long investigation into the 2,000 year-old-device is shedding new light onto this mysterious device… It wasn’t programmable in the modern sense, but it’s considered the world’s first analog computer.

schwit1 shares a report from the Associated Press:: For over a century since its discovery in an ancient shipwreck, the exact function of the Antikythera Mechanism — named after the southern Greek island off which it was found — was a tantalizing puzzle…. After more than a decade’s efforts using cutting-edge scanning equipment, an international team of scientists has now read about 3,500 characters of explanatory text — a quarter of the original — in the innards of the 2,100-year-old remains.
They say it was a kind of philosopher’s guide to the galaxy, and perhaps the world’s oldest mechanical computer.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – The World’s Oldest Computer May Have Predicted the Future