Talk:Wilhelm Schickard
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"This makes him the father of the computing era, and one of the most remarkable figures in computing history."
This statement seems vague and somewhat POV to me, for several reasons:
- Is there any specific historical delineation of "the computing era"? I doubt that there is, other than perhaps the circular one of saying that it started with Schickard.
- If there is such a thing as "the computing era", there is almost certainly no one figure who can be called its "father". Unless there is evidence of a clear and direct line of influence from Schickard's machine to present-day computing devices, and unless this line of influence is stronger than that from, say, Pascal, Leibniz, or Babbage, calling Schickard "the father of the computing era" seems unfounded.
- Calling Schickard "one of the most remarkable figures in computing history" seems subjective and also useless.
I agree. It seems NPOV, especially that he is 'one of the most remarkable'. --Ben davison 13:40, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Why is his device described as the first? What about things like the Antikythera mechanism? Eaglizard 17:37, 25 June 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Photo request
It would be neat to have a picture of the replica. -- Beland 18:08, 6 October 2007 (UTC)