The Roman empire fell because their Roman numerals weren't a form of positional notation, so they couldn't figure out binary. Their computers were terrible.
@foone “One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs." – Robert Firth
@jtlg@foone Yes. Hence the invention of the "triumvirate," a method for deciding if a program succeeded by running it three times; if all three runs agreed on the output, the run could be considered successful.
This was incredibly inefficient and left Rome vulnerable to sacking by the Hypervisigoths in the 5th Century.
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