Many of these technologies are really old, burning the midnight oil refers to oil lamps that date back at lest, 15,000 years ago. Various sailing references date back a minimum of 7,500 years old but could easily be much older technology.
Computing via moving pebbles could easily be a surprisingly recent idea ~500 BCE, but again it’s very difficult to date this stuff.
> Computing via moving pebbles could easily be a surprisingly recent idea ~500 BCE
By the 5th century BCE, Herodotus was writing about how Egyptians and Hellenes used their counting boards in different ways; by that point the technology was apparently widespread and taken for granted.
It’s hard to judge when a counting board with an explicit place-value system (where the tokens could represent different quantities depending on position) first arose, but I’d guess no later than like 2000 BCE, and possibly much earlier.
If you allow “pebbles” to also include little clay counters, and counting with them to include piling them up and changing units by trading one type of counter for another, then we have physical examples from 7500 BCE.
We have much older evidence still of counting via tally marks, because as archaeological evidence those are relatively easy to interpret. If people longer ago were counting with pebbles there’s almost no way we’d know it.
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> burning the midnight oil refers to oil lamps that date back at lest, 15,000 years ago
I take this phrase to mean doing some kind of scholarly work (reading/writing) late into the night. Apparently comes from Quarles (1635), Emblemes: “Wee spend our mid-day sweat, or mid-night oyle; Wee tyre the night in thought; the day in toyle.” So while burning stuff to make light is an old technology, this is not too old a metaphor.
Can you think of sailing metaphors which etymologically arose thousands of years ago, in forms still used? Obviously literal words like “ship”, “mast”, “row”, “sheet”, “wind”, “knot”, etc. are very old.
> If you allow “pebbles” to also include little clay counters, and counting with them to include piling them up and changing units by trading one type of counter for another, then we have physical examples from 7500 BCE.
What’s your source on that? I would be really interested in checking it out.
Hard to beat “calculate”, which is about finding numerical answers by moving pebbles around a counting board.