About

"The way I see it, if you're gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?"
Dr. Emmett Brown

The short now version:
The Computus Engine is an ongoing series of open source temporal tinkerings in Actionscript 3. The long term aim of the project is to build a Flash application for the interactive exploration of time.

The project and journal is the work of John Dalziel, a Flash Developer and writer based in the south coast of England. John studied astronomy at the Royal Greenwich observatory and is a charter member of the Long Now Foundation.

The Long now version:
Just before the millennium I started taking an interest in calendrical matters - Is it really the millennium? What happened to the year zero? All that kind of stuff. The thing is, it's a big subject and answering one question just raises a bunch of others. Well, just shy of ten years later I think I might have done enough digging to put this to some practical use.

I’m imagining an interactive timeline that lets you zoom in and out of any period throughout the entire history of the universe. In essence I want to do for the dimension of time what Google Earth has done for the exploration of the dimensions of space.

I’ve wanted to play with this thing for quite some time and to be fair, quite a few teams have had a go. It's just none of them have delivered quite what I can see in my head. It could be that one of the big search companies has something like this in the works already, but as no-one is talking about it, and I want to play with it now; I decided to build it myself.

John Dalziel
January 02008

email john @ this domain.

The content of this journal is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.
All source code is licenced under the MIT Licence