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A documentary, The World's First Computer, was produced in 2012 by the Antikythera mechanism researcher and film-maker Tony Freeth. [101] In 2012, BBC Four aired The Two-Thousand-Year-Old Computer; [102] it was also aired on 3 April 2013 in the United States on NOVA, the PBS science series, under the name Ancient Computer. [103]
Eventually, the concept of numbers became concrete and familiar enough for counting to arise, at times with sing-song mnemonics to teach sequences to others. All known human languages, except the Piraha language, have words for at least the numerals "one" and "two", and even some animals like the blackbird can distinguish a surprising number of items.
Several analog computers were constructed in ancient and medieval times to perform astronomical calculations. These included the astrolabe and Antikythera mechanism from the Hellenistic world (c. 150–100 BC). [8] In Roman Egypt, Hero of Alexandria (c. 10–70 AD) made mechanical devices including automata and a programmable cart. [9]
These computers were able to perform the calculations that were performed by the previous human clerks. Since the values stored by digital machines were not bound to physical properties like analog devices, a logical computer, based on digital equipment, was able to do anything that could be described "purely mechanical."
A human computer, with microscope and calculator, 1952. It was not until the mid-20th century that the word acquired its modern definition; according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first known use of the word computer was in a different sense, in a 1613 book called The Yong Mans Gleanings by the English writer Richard Brathwait: "I haue [] read the truest computer of Times, and the best ...
MONIAC (Monetary National Income Analogue Computer) also known as the Phillips Hydraulic Computer, was created in 1949 to model the national economic processes of the United Kingdom. The MONIAC consisted of a series of transparent plastic tanks and pipes.
Image credits: Sasha Weilbaker #4 Wind Blades. Humpback Whales are one of the largest weighing animals of the world, yet they are profound swimmers, which attributes down to its flippers (fins).
A vacuum-tube computer, now termed a first-generation computer, is a computer that uses vacuum tubes for logic circuitry. While the history of mechanical aids to computation goes back centuries , if not millennia , the history of vacuum tube computers is confined to the middle of the 20th century.