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Comment by rhelz | Hacker News Reader

I was studying how those mechanical calculators (like the one in "Hidden Figures") worked, and it struck me that Hero of Alexandria, or whoever made the Antikythra mechanism, could have easily made one. I thought long and hard about why Hero actually didn't make one of them.

The only answer I could come with was this: Nobody asked him to make one.

He had the tools, he had the skills, he had the workshop full of assistants. All he needed was a *purchase order* and we could have had mechanical calculators 2,000 years ago.

If you have minions, ask yourself if you are asking them to work on the right things. If you don't have minions, well ask yourself the same question.

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Better than that, the printing press is a stupid simple idea that could have been invented basically as soon as you had writing. Wooden printing blocks were used for hundreds of years before the press. As soon as someone had the idea to use it for letters, you could have a functional (if crude) press after a few iterations. Bootstrapping widespread literacy with cheap reading materials.

As always, tech people think tech is the important part of tech.

wow....that's such a great example that I never would have thought of it myself.

But...that's kind of the whole point being made here, right? :-)

> If you have minions, ask yourself if you are asking them to work on the right things. If you don't have minions, well ask yourself the same question.

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” — The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

I can't even image complexity of a mechanical calculator for Roman numerals.

Fun fact: The romans had abacuses (abaci?), which represent a positional number system--including a representation for zero. A Roman abacus would have beads arranged for both decimal (base 10) and dozenal (base 12) calculations--because some of their measures, e.g. 12 ounces to a point, were in base 12 much like the metric system is base 10-centric today. (the wiki article "Roman Abacus" has some nice pictures.)

So yah, Hero of Alexandria would not have had to even make any conceptual leaps like inventing positional number systems. The abacus he already had in his pocket would have been all he would have needed to get him started in the right direction.

> If you have minions, ask yourself if you are asking them to work on the right things.

What’s wrong with stealing the moon?

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