Computer Museum bids farewell to Babbage engine
mv-voice.com
mv-voice.com
>"To be clear, the museum's difference engine isn't an original built 160 years ago by Babbage, but rather it is a working model painstakingly designed and assembled in the 1990s. ... The London Science Museum keeps one Babbage Engine on display, but its design team also assembled a second model for a private benefactor who financed the project. That donor, Nathan Myhrvold, a former Microsoft executive, originally loaned his Babbage Engine to the Mountain View Computer History Museum in 2008 with the idea to exhibit it for just six months."
Couldn't be, Babbage never finished it, switched to the Analytical Engine (burning his government funding bridges) and never finished that either.
The subject of the article also isn't the original design, they're the No. 2 design following lessons learned working on the Analytical Engine.
Of note: on top of the two Difference Engines, the Science Museum built the printer which Babbage had designed for the Engine. Babbage had realised that many table errors came from typesetting transcription errors, so the printer was designed to produce stereotype plates, templates for mass-printing with limited room for human error.
Also contrary to what the article seems to say, Myhrvold didn't fund the first DE reconstruction. He commissioned one, and part of that commission was used to build the printer.
Do you think it would have greatly changed history if Babbage had succeeded at creating these mechanical computers? Or were they a vestigial dead end, and simply spreading the knowledge and theory to make them was the real extent of their influence? I'm guessing the latter, but in no way am I sure.
But the real bummer, is that Edison's lab essentially invented vacuum tubes, but shelved it as Edison didn't see any profit potential in it. Another missed opportunity for earlier computing.
On the other hand, they would have provided computing power almost a century before electronic computers, who knows what roads could have been taken that weren't open to us with the power of human computers?
If it had not only been successful, but caught on, people would have quickly made improvements, invented the idea of Turing machines and general purpose computers, Boolean logic, more efficient gates, etc. You could even have had transistors being invented in the 1800s! Who knows how far it could have gotten.
I wonder if the designs could have been simplified a great deal if he had known of Turing machines or boolean math. A machine based on Turing's original idea, or something like boolfuck, probably wouldn't have too many moving parts, though it would be quite slow. I believe Boole even designed a binary calculator that just used marbles and wood seesaws.
The greatest expense with the Difference engine was the thousands of tiny mechanical parts required.
And thus the computer industry was born.
I was lucky enough to be involved in a demo of the machine at the museum during a visit just over a year ago. I am based in the UK and was in San Jose visiting our company HQ for a couple of weeks. I went to the museum one weekend and was chatting to the two gentlemen who were due to run the demo; when I told them I'd seen the other machine in the Science Museum in London, they asked if I would discuss the differences (pun not intended) between the two during their presentation.
I was happy to oblige and spent a minute or so explaining how much better the one in Mountain View was because it wasn't behind glass and it could be seen in action.
I went back to the museum during another visit last October and saw the machine again. I guess there's now going to be a void to fill next to the Cray, but even without the Babbage Engine, the museum is really worth a visit.
Happy travels crazy computer.
Totally brings this to life: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2247
It's really something.
I can't really recommend it, since half (or more) of it is about Doron Swade navigating the politics of a London Museum in order to get the thing built. But there is an interesting history of Babbage.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Difference-Engine-Charles-Computer...
http://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/an/2005/03/man2005030070-a...
Jacquard's Web [1] was a good break from this tradition and goes into the technical foundations for Babbage's work - highlighting the loom industry in Lyons but primarily focusing on Babbage and Lovelace's technical efforts.
My two favorite quotes from this book:
Babbage does not himself use the words 'programming' or
'program'. These terms had not yet entered the language and
he is therefore obliged to resort to more obscure
expressions. For example, he describes the Analytical
Engine as being made 'special' for the mathematical
formula in question. In precisely the same way, we could
visualize a Jacquard loom that was programmed to weave a
lily as being made 'special' for the task of lily-weaving.
Babbage also borrowed from the Jacquard loom the plan of
creating what he describes as a 'library' of cards that
carry out different functions, with the Analytical Engine's
operator being able to take cards from the library as
required and input them into the machine in order to make it
special for the task. The enormous advantage of the Jacquard
loom was, of course, precisely that it was able to weave any
picture or pattern for which a chain of cards had been made.
Weavers would keep these chains of cards in a storeroom
whose function was very much the same as that of the
library–or we might even say software library–which Babbage
was proposing to create.
Unfortunately, the thing had so many moving parts and was so unruly that I never got to see it actually working. It was almost always out of order and eventually was retired.
In short: If you haven't seen the darned thing, and you're anywhere near Mountain View, I guess now is the time. And, if you miss the Babbage engine, you should still go check out the CHM. As nerds, it's like the museum of our people. Where else can you see one of the first computer games or hear one the first computer music pieces being demonstrated by the people who wrote them? (Though those also have a time limit...the folks who wrote those first games and musical compositions are in their seventies; they won't be docents at the CHM forever.)
But they could certainly have tried and that alone would probably have been enough to drive someone to improve the design and manufacture of relays.
Is there anyone about who has expertise in this field who could give a better answer?
(1) http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/untangling-the-tale-o...
I know its poor form to mention such things but "unique" and "priceless" are both absolutes: something is unique/priceless or it's not. For example, if one thinks about two unique things it is not possible to say which is more unique than the other. (If one thinks about Difference Engines, since there is one in the Science Museum and one in the Computer History Museum, neither is unique.)
Usually when I see this sort of thing I shrug and remind myself that living languages constantly change. (It seems that "unique" has lost some of its force and is changing its meaning to something like "very unusual" or "very rare".) But two examples in one sentence apparently stirs the old fuddy-duddy in me to action...
A chair that I make is unique, there is not another exactly like it.
A chair that I make is unique, there is only one in the world made by me.
In this case, the chair is unique in a very specific way.
However, the Babbage engine is unique in more ways. First mechanical computer of a certain complexity. Only mechanical computer with so much funding from the government. Build quality, ability etc...
I'm so happy we went and I'm doubly so I got to see this machine operate during a demo. It makes the most impressive sounds!
Even without this machine, the computer history museum was far more impressive than I imagined it would be.
Of course, that would probably mean building a different "microcode camshaft"...
I'm not sure it can print letters.
We could, however, build a music-box-like device that would "print" the accumulator as pair of pitch/duration notes, a "sound impression device", or SID.
That would certainly drive future historians nuts.
Might have to go to the closer one in London then.
IIRC the whole reason Babbage could not build it was because the machine shops of the day could not produce precise enough parts...
He's worth $650m plus, so there's likely no amount of money that would convince him to leave the machine in the museum.