Someone hacked a pregnancy test to play doom. There used to be a Reddit sub /r/itrunsdoom for unconventional media to run doom on.
To clarify a misconception, the pregnancy test was not running Doom. The guy who did it connected the test's display to an external device which was actually running the game, it was just displayed on the pregnancy test's screen.
True but some of the hacks were nuts
It was a replacement screen, too, not the built-in display.
So it was basically a pregnancy test case mod.
:( aww mayn
So was she pregnant or not?
Yes. And it was a healthy demon.
The device was not running the game either, just a video of it - but people have connected this (very standard) display to Raspberry Pis and even any Linux machine over HDMI.
to clarify, this machine is way less impressive than what a lot of media claim it is. the greeks had hundreds of years of stargazing and records to figure out a model of the cosmos, and this is basically their whole model in a mechanism. unfortunately, at the time this thing was made, their model was pretty far off and they couldn't come up with a better one due to philosophical reasons (the earth is the center! the orbits of the planets must be some sort of perfect circles!).
anyway, this thing is somewhat impressive technically, but is really bad in terms of engineering:
we knew that the greeks had a model of the cosmos before we discovered this (i think). we also knew, from greek records, that there were people discussing about "spheres" that tracked the positions of the planets, sun and moon as they moved through the sky. the main thing this mechanism shows is that the ancient greeks possibly pioneered complex gear mechanisms, and the knowledge was then passed on and on and went through times like the islamic golden age before coming back to europe in the form of clockwork and watchmaking.
can it play doom though?
if you will it hard enough it can even play crysis.
seriously, most of the hype for this thingy comes from some random documentary directors who thought the ancient greeks were as intelligent as monkeys and such. anyone who says this is an alien invention is basically insulting any intelligent life who has come far enough to go interstellar
Sir please keep this USB stick away from the machine
Whispering into Radio We've got another nerd here!
All true, and yet still impressive.
While there are a lot of features that I would have done differently, but I've got a copy of the Machinists Handbook and a trade school education. Imagine the guy who had to invent this thing as he went. dude was the Wozniak of his day.
anthoer thing is that this machine clearly wasn't the first draft. not only do we have those mentions of "spheres", but there aren't that many mistakes we see in the construction of the mechanism (apart from the dovetail joint). clearly the layout of the gears was planned beforehand, or they did trial-and-error with the gears on another version of the mechanism.
Yeah Chris of youtube channel Clickspring has said during his replica build that there are features that suggest the maker was trying to make the mechanism more compact, like some gears that are friction fit on their axles rather than pinned to leave their tops flat, which suggests this wasn't the maker's first rodeo.
The thing that blows my mind the most about the Antikythera mechanism is that we don't have anything else remotely like it in the archeological record from anywhere near the time it must have been made. You can imagine a simpler but still useful gear-based calendar device, maybe similar to this one but with fewer functions, being made before this. But no evidence of them survives to the modern day.
It would be like exploring a Civil War site and finding the corroded remains of an Apple Newton. While relatively primitive compared to later, more successful PDAs and smart phones, it's still a surprisingly functional machine and way more sophisticated than you thought possible for the context you found it in that you wonder if it's not significantly newer than its surroundings.
that is true. the mechanism shows us that they definitely had some mechanism making culture going on. my point is that, despite how bizzare and sophisticated it sounds, this sort of thing was 100% doable for their level of tech, and that it is us who have misunderstood history. the hype surrounding it, making it sound like a supernatural creation and way more intelligent than it actually is, is bs.
My hot take: it's not really a "computer" unless it's Turing-complete. The Antikythera mechanism is incredibly cool and all, but it can only perform a finite, fixed set of calculations and thus fails to meet that definition.
Technically it's a computer because it can compute something, it's just not a universal computer.
Porn?
Can it go up to 80085?
unzip
Yes, most computers should also be able to run WinRAR.
Yup. I explain old automatic transmissions as Hydraulic Computers.
Right, so you consider calculators to be computers too? And I don't mean the beefy scientific calculators, just simple ones with basic operations.
"Computer" is literally anything that performs computations -- it even used to be a job title.
"Mechanical Computers" were almost exclusively limited in what they could compute.
Yes.
What's your take on the E6B flight computer?
"As is tradition" -- oh wait that's Blondihacks, sorry.
Honestly if you can run Doom on it it’s like being able to make an Americano from an espresso or something. It’s very simple. I want to see you run Shrek 2 on it. That is true class.
We have a CT scan of the device. Now the question is, can we simulate it in the Doom engine?
No no, simulate it in Minecraft.
Run doom on classic wooden abacus, i dare you
I can't right now, my abacus has a busted video card.
Eyes?
Didn't some biology nerds program a bunch of microbes to simulate Doom? Or am I too early on the timeline?
Technically, it was a display made from E. Coli cells, not actually programming the microbes to run it themselves...
... but yes, Doom has been used in a computer where the display was E. Coli.
Used to be? The sub no longer exists? I'd check, but I'm not at a computer and I dont use Reddit on my phone
Wait so is that like basically different clock mechanisms hooked into each other?
the ancient greeks came up with their own model to track and predict
this machine is basically their mathematical models summarized into mechanical form
Clock? Ah, you must mean "time computer".
They just don't want you to know that it contains a dozen meticulously drawn pictures of Susteros of Thebes' stylishly tiny penis.
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