Solidot | Scientists reconstruct Antikythera machine from 2100 years ago

The Antikythera Mechanism, a mysterious 2,100-year-old ancient Greek calculator, was discovered in 1902 in a shipwreck off the island of Antikythera, and it wasn't until 2006 that researchers finally knew how it worked. Now scientists have recovered and built a new working model of the machine. The machine's creator, former museum curator Michael Wright, demonstrated (on Youtube) how the machine works. Although it claimed to be the "first computer", it did not actually meet the basic needs of a computer. Michael Edmunds, a professor at Cardiff University's School of Physics and Astronomy and a member of the Antikythera Machine research project, said he would rather call it a calculator, which can add, subtract, multiply and divide, but cannot be programmed. But it was a very advanced calculator: its complex gearing would not appear again in Europe until 1,000 years later in medieval watchmaking.