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Babbage Engine Printer Finally Available
MrCreosote writes: "This story from the BBC announces the availability of a printer for the Babbage Difference Engine. Originally designed to print the tables that were calculated by the difference engine, it includes advanced features such as user definable formatting and auto line wrap. It is widely believed that the lack of peripherals was a significant factor in the failure of the Difference Engine taking off and gaining a significant market share -- a situation that has led to the current Microsoft monopoly." Kudos to the folks at London's Science Museum who actually built this.
I mean, for it's time the Difference Engine was a highly advanced concept, but it's now the year 2000, not 1780, and we have these amazing things called computers. What is the point of building something which can't even compete with my pocket calculator? And then building a printer for it? Is it my imagination, or is this just a waste of taxpayer's money, money which would be better spent on important social services like health care?
...going to write a Linux driver for it?
> What would Democrit (first postulated the existence of atoms ins
:)
.
>ancient greece) say if he saw a scanning tunneling microscope in action?
Ah, yes, Democretes (or whatever the correct phrase is). WIth the simple
demand, "Show me your atoms Democretes," Aristotle set physics back
a thousand years. Hmm, 200years/word, not bad
And in the last civilization that had a fighting chance of doing
the analytics for several hundred years (I'm guessing the next after
Athens would be Arabs in the late first millenium), he set it
back another 500 with his "natural rate of fall" instead of testing
gravity.
The biting irony of the whole thing is that in the introduction to
his Physics, he states the need to test with experiment . .
hawk, a philsopher and physicist as well
Now, if only Babbage or one of his contemporaries had designed a telegraph modem of some sort, the prospect of a Victorian Internet would be raised.
Yep. I just think it's a shame that 19th century engineering wasn't up to the manufacture of these things - think what would have followed.
:) Ok, I know it'd only run for a few seconds before siezing (lubricant molecules are of the same order as some component dinemsions) but it'd still be cool.
I fancy wasnering down to our micro (and nano) engineering dept. here at Birmingham Uni (UK) and seeing if they could make a nano-sized version. Portable difference engines
There's always that book "The Difference Engine" by Gibson and Sterling - very good and thought provoking account of how things could have turned out.
Troc
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
From what I remember, they built one of his simpler models, proving the concept but didn't have the technical expertise to produce the full difference engine (I think they byult the analytical engine or something). They couldn't manufacture enough parts consistently - there was also a problem with expense, the experts were very expensive, as were the raw materials.
Troc
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
I can't be the only /.er who remembers programs that printed Snoopy Calendars on text-only line printers by exploiting over-printing and the different densities of the various characters.
So, it is a real question: could one find settings for the Difference engine + printer that would print a Snoopy Calendar? or any recognisable image?
Is there a simulator available?
Actually that's an ever better question, and a nice student project: write a Difference engine (or even Analytical Engine) simulator -- ideally with graphics showing the simulated machine in operation, but failing that, just simulating the abstract operations.
Steve Linton
I'd heard this too. It seems Babbage could have done it if he'd had the money and perhaps the Project Management skills. It wasn't an absolute problem with materials or machine tools.
...cuz we all want to replay that flameware :-)
--
Infuriate left and right
A beowulf of these!
(sorry! I had to!)
More seriously, wouldn't it be more interesting to have a CAD/software model of the system. By trying it out in a simulation, generations to come might learn a trick or two about engineering, thus, thinking better.
A joyous effort however.
I think, therefore thoughts exist. Ego is just an impression.
I remember one of my first printers... the old Gorilla Bannana, which was an 8 wire dot matrix printer where each wire was actually that... a wire, that went out into a seperate magnetic coil. They were all seperated by a quarter inch or so, and you could watch them move while it worked.
:)
Slow, noisy, and primitive looking... it was probably less advanced then the unit Babbage designed hundreds of years before...
Though it did have a parallel port
Mathematically impossible requirements are technically not against policy.
The Register, a British tech news site, had this to say on the 2.5 ton device:
"New device not ideal for mobile use..."
A computer printer that was originally designed more than 150 years ago has finally been built and will go on display at the Science Museum in London, UK.
:) )
And I thought getting hardware support for Linux took a long time!
(Sorry, couldn't resist it
Cheers,
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Last time I heard anything about this Difference Engine project, I seem to remember that, although the parts were manufactured using modern techniques, they were only made to the tolerances possible in Babbage's day. Anybody know anything about this?
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Weblogging Considered Harmful:
I don't know much about US museums, but when I was wandering around Europe I discovered the Deutch-Museum (spelling?) in Munich, Germany.
That place is a geek wonderland. I wandered around for two happy days, looking at the underwater phone cables, steam engines, old computers, really old mechanical computing devices, the big model railroad, the submarine(!), the interactive chemistry experiments. And they have live demonstrations of bigger experiments, one of which is a demonstration of artificial lightning. Indoors! BOOM! (and the little model of the house catches fire... Whee!)
Check it out if you are ever in Munich.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
Well... He should've read Cogs Complete then, shouldn't he?
Silly Babbage.
The Babbage Engine is dead, all right? Can't you people just give it up? Face it, there's no hope for the Babbage Engine ever coming back.
C'mon. Grow up and get a real computer.
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Pretend there is some witty statement here.
The article says that Babbage purposely inserted errors to foil competitors. And here we were, thinking all the bugs in MickySoft products were because the marketing team rushed beta products out the door.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
it is worthwhile to understand the past.
When an anthropologist makes a flint knife, is he wasting his time because he can by a far superior pocket knife for a couple of bucks?
Are paleontologists wasting their time trying to understand dinosaurs because they are extinct?
There are three good reasons I can immediately see to build something like this.
(1) It helps us get a better appreciation exactly what our ancestors were capable of doing.
A lot of people have crackpot economic and social theories that flourish in ignorance of history. We have a tendency to think that the way things turned out was inevitable; it is important to question these assumptions. What had happened if Babbage had more time and resources? Things could have been very different
(2) It has educational value -- it can teach students about mechanics and mathematics.
(3) It is important for designers to understand the basic principles of computational machines, and no better way to understand basic principles than looking at real examples early primitive machines. Sure you can plug together boards and create a powerful computer, but what about people in the future who will create entirely new computational technologies such as mechanical nanocomputers? These people will need to have a database of basic designs.
Who knows, maybe someday we'll have the quantum equivalent of mercury delay tubes in some future computer. Part of the charm of computer science is that in many ways there is nothing new under the sun.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Don't do me any favors kids, I'll just build it myself out of this coffin. Ingrates!
Somebody get me Ada, we've got work to do...
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
The French had an image-capable fax system running over telegraph lines in *1869* - using synchronised pendulums kept in time with tacho pulses. The input end was a contact point moving over an embossed foil or similar to give a pulsed current representing the image or text. Each tacho pulse represented one raster line, and the printing was direct, using electrochromic ink to respond to the incoming pulses. I think it operated over ~20 km at least.
There was a reference to this in New Scientist about 5 years ago.
Not bad, 20 years ahead of the telephone!
Ooh, I'm dying for a sig...
I hope I'm not alone at being awestruck at what this man accomplished so long ago. It's rare in the present that something is envisioned so far ahead of it's time that it takes decades to let manufacturing technologies to catch up with IT instead of developing uses for an already made product. Also, he designed the device without a working prototype yet it works flawlessly IRL. I know if I were to design something that grandiose on paper, it wouldn't work at all :^) All I can say is "I'm not worthy" :^)
Here's a page full of links and info on not only Babbage and his engine but also emulation of his Analytical Engine. There are also links to download the source for the mathematical function library and the java.
"Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality." -- Dalai Lama
Don't know about the printer, but then all the Babbage papers can be purchased here.
Sorry, not free as in "no money", but I guess the copyright will have expired now so free in that sense?
It's a neat hack :-)
Hi!
So is there a difference engine emulator available for Linux?
And I think we should give Babbage honorary First Post for this article.
No sig? Sigh...
At least it could withstand an EMP shockwave.
But then again, bugs might litereally have eaten away at the programming.
Dom.
Apparently, it "crashed" last night, and they'd been up all night trying to unjam the mechanism (the equivalent of rebooting!) Plus ca change.
The London Science Museum is pretty kick ass as far as Museums go. They have a huge section devoted to old computers. Although more European Centric (or perhaps non-US centric) it covers some of the non-US computers that pre-date Univac.
I can only think of a couple science museums in the states that are on par with the quality and the size of the London Science Museum.
Nathan Myrvold, the former head of Microsoft R&D, paid for this project. He's supposed to get a Difference Engine and printer for his house out of the deal. Really.
In a Scientific American article on the DE a few years ago, it was noted that one cog template in particular had bits that stuck out in the wrong direction, and only by trying to build the machine could you notice that it was wrong.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Damn! And i thought my HP Laserjet IIISi was big... imagine trying to get that into your house!
I recently purchased a Meccano set which included the blueprints for the Analytical Engine version 4, which I built and it works fine but it would be nice to have a printer to go with it. Do I need to upgrade to Lubricating Oil Pack 3 to be able to use it?