I don't find the ambiguity weird, but rather poetic. Perhaps it is intentional. After all, computer technology has come such a long way in just our lifetime. A modern computer would probably be just as alien to someone in the 1920s as the 20s. In the same way, an average person today would be just as baffled by the ENIAC as they would an Antikythera mechanism...

I sincerely doubt that English is the only language that supports such word play.

I was expecting some ancient Greek algorithms that used stacks or priority queues, haha.

Me too clicked the link expecting stories of heap and stack uses before computers.

It's a garden-path sentence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

One is lead to believe the subject is "the ancient world before computers", as it would be in "the ancient world before computers had gladiators and triremes", but the subject is "computers", and the ancient world is the topic.

The ordinarily “The Ancient World” means an era ending with the fall of the Western Roman Empire circa 476 CE.

All that world was well before computers were a thing (even the human type were called “scribes,” “clerks” etc.)

So of course I read it the same way even though “before computers” was redundant once your comment made me think about it.

If that had been the way it was intended, I think it would have been phrased "stacks and heaps."

I.e. "the ancient world had stacks and heaps" as opposed to "the ancient world had stacks or heaps," which sounds weird.

Well of course they had stacks and queues - computing adopted those terms from the real world. Stacks were even used for calculating in the form of an abacus.

This has nothing to do with English, it's just syntactic ambiguity. Every language has it.

"Novel analysis of the Antikythera mechanism suggests all of its wheels were statically allocated at construction time"

I’m no grammarian but I think it should have a comma after “world”.

Yeah, I was all ready to learn about how the ancient Egyptians used stacks to build the pyramids or something.