Dartmouth
The Neukom Institute at Dartmouth presents:
Mission Impossible: Constructing Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine
Given by Doron Swade on May 8th at Dartmouth College
Computing is widely viewed as a phenomenon of the electronic age. The mechanical prehistory of computing tends to be seen as a cozy gas-lit back-story to the undoubted triumphs of modernity, but a past to which the electronic computer owes little. So it perhaps surprising to claim that the core ideas in the realisation of the modern computer emerged explicitly in the 19th century in the designs for vast automatic calculating engines conceived by the English mathematician Charles Babbage, and in the work of Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron. Babbage’s work has been revisited in the modern era: his massive Difference Engine No. 2, designed in the late 1840s but unbuilt in his lifetime, was completed in 2002, and a project is now underway to construct for the first time his legendary Analytical Engine, the first design for a full-fledged, automatic, programmable, digital computing machine. This presentation reviews Babbage’s pioneering work on automatic computing, locates his work in its historical context, and describes the scale, scope and planned outcomes for the construction of the Analytical Engine.
For information about the ongoing effort: plan28.org
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~neukom/
Source
I wish he would stand still.
For Ada Lovelace: „Knowledge Engine“: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puDSUJcJ0qc
How would Mr. Babbage feel if he knew that on your desk right there is an extremely advanced version of his analytical engine?
This is great, but just when it gets interesting he starts saying things like "I'm probably spending too much time on this" and turns to another topic o.O
I ran across this old digital computer design ( patent 3190554 ) that ran on compressed air instead of electricity. Was such a digital computer ever built and used for anything? Could such a digital computer be built using 3D printing? If Babbage had gone the compressed air route for his computer could London's organ grinders have helped him build his Difference Engine? I read that Babbage and the organ grinders were bitter enemies. Could Babbage's original design be build today with 3D printing?
You might as well skip the deadly first 6 minutes. 6:00
Sounds like a great idea, I only understand about 5% of the stuff on how the machine works, but the Science Museum one is great just to watch!