Victorian 'supercomputer' is reborn (BBC) {Babbage's Difference Engine 2}

[eppur_se_muova]

By Maggie Shiels
Technology reporter, Silicon Valley

The world of computing could have been very different to that of today had a machine that was designed over 150 years ago been built at the time.

That is the view of Doron Swade, the man who is behind realising the creation of the famed Difference Engine No 2 which has just gone on display in Silicon Valley.

The reason the machine is so highly regarded is because it is seen as the first attempt at automated computing and viewed as something of a missing link in technology history.

Designed by the 19th Century computer pioneer Charles Babbage, the Difference Engine No 2 is a piece of Victorian technology meant to compute mathematical expressions called polynomials and return results to more than 31 digits, knocking the socks off your souped up pocket calculator.

Added to that it has a printer which stamps the results of its calculations on paper and on a plaster tray.
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more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7391593.stm

[notesdev]

1. What an awesome piece of work

Steam-driven computing... simply amazing how far the ideas were ahead of the technology available to implement them.

[Lithos]

2. Steam punk lives!

:)

Then again, the Apraphulians of New Guinea had what probably amounts to a Stone Age digital computer or by analogy, "Stone Punk"

http://www.huyton.net/rope.html

On edit: - corrected name.

[hunter]

3. I MUST see this.

I've been obsessed by computers since I was a little kid, and this was a machine I thought about a lot, since I first read about it when I was five or six years old.

Before I took up a soldering iron, I used to build little computers out of paper, cardboard, thumbtacks, glue, and lots and lots of tape. One of my little kid dreams was to build an entirely mechanical tic-tac-toe computer, but then I discovered electrical relays and went on to build my own tiny version of the Harvard Mark I.


http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/?year=1944

[Tesha]

6. You've seen this, of course?

http://www.ohgizmo.com/2006/12/14/the-tinkertoy-tic-tac-toe-playing-computer/

http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~cfs/472_html/Intro/TinkertoyComputer/TinkerToy.html

[hunter]

7. Hooray!!!

A dream realized...

But I think my parents would have freaked out if I built that. It was bad enough that I was always dropping my soldering iron and burning holes in my bedroom carpet.

Thanks.

[HeresyLives]

4. WHY was it never built?

[eppur_se_muova]

5. The perfect became the enemy of the good ...

Babbage kept wanting to improve the design, and wrote in so many changes it kept slipping farther and farther behind schedule ... finally, his patrons quit funding him. (IIRC, a big IF)

[zalinda]

8. That's not quite true

According to Jacquard's Web by James Essinger, it was not really possible to build the machine back then. He first had the idea of the Analytical machine, when he came upon the notion of the Difference machine. He had backing for the Analytical machine, but didn't want to finish it because he saw the Difference machine as far superior. His backers wanted him to continue on with the Analytical machine, but even that would have proved problematic. The problem was the milling of the gears, they had to be very precise and could not be cast with any precision. He did have a person who could make the gears (he was an expert craftsman)but this person was also a bit of a flake, and would ask for more money or just not do the work. As the Difference machine would employee thousand of gears, the process of making it bogged down the project.

Jacquard's Web traces the emergence of the computer from the Jacquard Loom that was developed in the late 1700's to the computer that we recognize today. It is quite a fascinating story.

http://www.jamesessinger.com/jaquard.htm

zalinda

[HeresyLives]

9. Thank you both,

eppur_se_muova and zalinda.

[Vidar]

10. William Gibson, of cyberpunk fame, wrote a very passable piece of histoical fiction

about that possibility.