I was hoping someone would respond to that AP headline. It may bring a laugh, but let's not let the young people think it is true.

This seems relevant.

You photoshopped McCain's head onto my body, didn't you?

Wait...No, can't be me. He's using more than two fingers.

Konrad Zuse invented the first electronic computer in the 1930s in Germany. The ENIAC was the first completely electronic US computer, I think, and it is older than McCain by a couple years.

Charles Babbage is credited with the design of the modern computer in the mid 1800s: the difference engine. He never quite finished it, though.

Wilhelm Shickard's Calculating Clock in 1623 could be considered for that matter. Napier's Bones was a manual computer.

Babbage is it. McCain is younger :-)

Is it true that McCain learned his Republican values while sitting on Abe Lincoln's knee?

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."
Hunter S. Thompson

See "subject" line.

The first device I know of that might plausibly be called a computer would be the "Antikythera Mechanism" developed in Greece, possibly by Hipparchus, and dating to 150 to 100 BC.

If John McCain predates that, then I'm switching my vote away from Obama. Seemingly immortal beings just command that much respect with me.

Check out Grace Hopper. She, a computer scientist, was born 30 years before McCain.

A pioneer in the field, she was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I calculator, and she developed the first compiler for a computer programming language.

Grace Hopper, the mother of COBOL.

Thats not a smear people its satire, you ain't seen nothing yet.

If McCain doesn't want to promote the image of being born before computers, he might want to talk less openly about how computer illiterate he is, which makes him sound, well, old. From a NYT interview:

"[McCain] said, ruefully, that he had not mastered how to use the Internet and relied on his wife and aides like Mark Salter, a senior adviser, and Brooke Buchanan, his press secretary, to get him online to read newspapers (though he prefers reading those the old-fashioned way) and political Web sites and blogs.

'They go on for me,' he said. 'I am learning to get online myself, and I will have that down fairly soon, getting on myself.'"