[giantrobot]

> It seems implausible for a culture to produce a singular advanced mechanical computer with no precursors and then stop and never make anything like it again.

A culture didn't create it. A person or team created it. The Antikythera mechanism was built before the ISO 9001 specification so its documentation may not have survived long past its creators lives. The high precision manufacturing required, in an era before high precision was all that precise, suggests the mechanism was likely a rare artifact. It was dumb luck it was found in the first place.

There's likely many complicated ancient devices lost to time because they weren't widely available or described in documents that have persisted. You literally run a search engine for marginalia that may not be popular or widely known. It wouldn't take much to knock a lot of that content off the web and be lost to history.

[marginalia_nu]

> There's likely many complicated ancient devices lost to time because they weren't widely available or described in documents that have persisted. You literally run a search engine for marginalia that may not be popular or widely known. It wouldn't take much to knock a lot of that content off the web and be lost to history.

Well that's my point. Not that the greeks had some forgotten industrial revolution, but that archeological records are very limited, and we were a stroke of dumb luck away from never discovering the antikythera mechanism. It raises the question of if we almost missed this, what else did we miss. Not just in greece but elsewhere too.