Slashdot Mirror
Babbage, A Look Back
A reader writes "System Toolbox just started a new computer history section in an effort to get us geeks in touch with our "roots." The current article in the monthly column focuses on Charles Babbage. The editor and author hope to raise awareness of our past so that scenes like this won't continue to take place. A big hill to climb, but worth the effort."
And I wouldn't read it for informative purposes (especially the historical sort), but it is a pretty good book.
I found Computer: A History of the Information Machine, by Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray gave a good overview of the history of computing ... not too detailed but gives enough to lead you to know what you want to find out more about ...
The article posted on binaryfreedom is both fascinating and
disturbing but also, I think, misleading, as it suggests that
only the educational misfits are ignorant of computer history.
This is emphatically untrue
I've recently "graduated" from a University in England and I'm
ashamed. I would estimate that 90% of my class are ignorant of
not only computer history but also of trans-Windows computing in
general. Their goal in life seems to be to make as much money as
possible and the computer industry is the vehicle for that
"success".
I wish systemtoolbox all the best in their endeavour but I fear
that the only people who will read these articles will be people
who are interested (and hence already familiar) with this
material already.
Hell, when I was that age, I used to read computer magazines in class, and a girl who sat next to me once asked "why I read those things?" Since she was hot and I was shocked that she was actually speaking to me, I answered the not quite accurate "it tells me how to fix them," to which she replied, "why don't you just take it to the shop?" Likewise, several months ago, I was talking with a younger cousin about the video game industry (where I'm currently working), and we were discussing what makes games good. His entire list of quality games was less than a year old, and when I mentioned Pac Man and the Infocom games, he had only the vaguest clue that such things once existed. Furthermore, his interests were more in how to get rich writing games rather than how a programmer actually writes good AI routines, or an artist animates characters realisticaly.
The point is, there will always be a large element of society, at any age, which is both ignorant and uninterested in the history of anything. Most of these people will remain in the realm of Average Consumer, while the inquisitive will go forth, research the past, and build the future. The danger comes from the past-less few who simply abuse the tools that are available to them, or arguably worse, become the leaders who direct the doers of society, with little grip on why the wheels of progress turn a certain way, and no concern for how they're powered to enable to future. Because when the percieved joy is in reaching the destination, rather than within the journey itself, it tends to be one hell of a bumpy ride that doesn't exactly pave a smooth road for those who follow.
"He used a Captain Crunch whistle to generate a 2600 kilohertz tone to get free phone calls..."
2,600,000 Hz, that's a pretty high pitch!
The quote by Ken Thompson at the bottom of the article referenced in the Slashdot story is from a very interesting speech, Reflections on Trusting Trust.
Here is the quote:
"I have watched kids testifying before Congress. It is clear that they are completely unaware of the seriousness of their acts. There is obviously a cultural gap. The act of breaking into a computer system has to have the same social stigma as breaking into a neighbor's house. It should not matter that the neighbor's door is unlocked. The press must learn that misguided use of a computer is no more amazing than drunk driving of an automobile."
What should be the Response to Violence?
Bush's education improvements were
This rather doofy rationale has been expounded before. The counterargument, of course, is that if kids tinker with locks it's one thing... when they tinker with the locks on other peoples' buildings and go walking around inside, it's another entirely.
You don't get to "tinker" with other people's stuff. How anyone could think one should be granted that right because one is "curious", I'll never understand.
In the sciencemuseum in Londen they built Difference engine no.2. See Babbage at the science museum
I think the context of that quote was that Hooke objected to Newton not giving him proper credit for "Hooke's Law" --that the restoring force of a spring is proportional to its displacement from equilibrium. Newton then did some research and found about 20 other guys who also "discovered" this rather obvious observation, and cited all of them, placing Hooke's name last on the list. Then he fired off this quote. So the real message is more of a flame of Hooke, yet most people consider it some great admission of humility.
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
I've seen it suggested that it wasn't until the 1950's or so that "computer" referred to a machine. Whether the machines in question were IBM punch machines or the UNIVAC, I don't recall. Since my copy of "History of Modern Computing" hasn't been returned yet, that's where this comment ends.
-Paul Komarek
Absolutely. "Math" ith a Roman Catholic thervith.
For some reason he didn't publish his results. Some believe that he was told not to by the British government, so that they could use his discovery during the Crimean war. Babbage's work on this subject was discovered in his notebooks after his death.
Every bloody emperor has his hand up history's skirt [Peter Hammill/VdGG]
My advice is to make the effort and go to H2K2 and get a real sample. I think you will find like I did when I spoke at H2K, that the majority are well informed about our history.
Like any culture, our culture needs to be taught! Only so many can have had first hand experience and there are less of us each day. Yet, each day, there are more just coming into interest who need to be taught. If you find such a teacherless group of people interested in computers, you should take it upon yourself to teach who we are.
Show people the first computer you ever programmed. Show them the games you played and wrote. Show them how to say "Hello World!" directly with a Turing Machine or in Java and everything between.
Tell them about Norbert Wiener and Marie Ampere. Warren McCulloch, J.C.R. Licklider, John von Neumann and Vannevar Bush. Alan Turing, Claude Shannon and David Levy (yes Ken Thompson too and Belle). Scott Adams(all three) and Stanislaw Lem. Joeseph Weizenbaum and Eliza, Alaxander Bain and Donald Hebb. Nolan Bushnell, Ted Dabney and Larry Bryan. Alan Kay and Steve Russell. David Gottieb, Joel Hochberg and Al Arcorn. Thomas Hobbes and Levithan. Charles Darwin, Erasmus Darwin and Thomas Huxley. Aristotle and Lucretius. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Charles Babbage and Blaise Pascal. B. F. Skinner and Wilhelm Wundt. Robert Tinney and Peter Max. J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly. John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky. Doug Lenat, Push Singh and myself.
We will always need more teachers who know how to both show and to tell!
I interview a lot of co-op students for job placements in the company that I work for now, and for large company in the past. Sometimes, I get some really cocky student who comes in with a smug attitude that he knows it all.
Sure enough, he can answer the technical questions flawlessly just as if he had read it from a textbook. He could show ingenuity for coming up with solutions on the fly as well... And usually when they get that look in their eye: "I know you want to hire me - make me a REALLY good offer, and I might consider working for you." I then ask the killer question:
"Who is Charles Babbage?"
The blank look on their face is priceless. It's a simple curveball. I've received answers ranging from: "I'm not sure - wasn't he featured in PC Magazine last month?" to "Oh - he's the founder of IBM." and "I... I... Don't know..."
I then answer the question with a short history lesson. They of course often recall it - yes, but didn't think that it was important.
I'm amazed at how much computing history has been forgotten from introductory courses in High School. There was an incredible amount of effort and ingenuity required to get us to the place we are today: information available within seconds, toys to entertain, tools to teach and make life easier (mine is easier now because of them), communication barriers broken down, etc... It's caused other problems too, but man - what doesn't. I'll take the benefits over the problems any day.
Hanging up in my office is a picture of Charles Babbage, and one of Ada.
"Who is Grace Hopper?" is my backup question.
Hehehehe...
I donate all spillover Karma to the charity of my choice... Ada was still a babe despite what people may say...
You should feel dumb. This is your TRADE. You should know at least a little about it's history. If you don't recognize names like Ken Thompson and Charles Babbage, you are in a sorry state indeed.
Do you want to know how it helps? It helps you to appreciate where it came from, the work involved in creating these machines and the passion others have had for them. It would help you to understand where YOU fit in the grand scheme of things, and it'll help you to have a little pride in your work. It's all about respect. It's about respecting the genius that made your trade possible, respecting the machine they have built and respecting yourself enough to do the best job you can. As a man who works with computers, you have to live up to the promise of your forebears. No one expects you to be another Babbage or Thompson, but you have a duty to yourself to understand the commitment they had and reflect at least some of it.
You may think of yourself as just someone who fixes computers, but you aren't. You are a steward of the legacy of those that came before, all of us are. All of us have a duty to maintain the tradition and memory of these men. Without there contributions and endless hours of work and passion for the machine, we wouldn't even have computers.
So, pick up a book. Read. The history of our trade is a glorious thing, full of great men and brilliant engineering. Only through it's study can we hope to go as far as they did.
Paul Anderson
"I drank WHAT?!" -- Socrates
Newton said "If I have seen further it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants". Taken out of context it seems like a noble thing to say, but it was actually intended as an insult to Robert Hooke his contemporary and hated rival, who was very short and by all accounts sensitive about the fact.
Nope - this is (probably) a fallacy. See this for the details.
What about organic computers ?? [As an alternative to "mechanical rod" based nanocomputers]
I remember reading long ago about organic molecules being able to "switch" between two polarized states under the influence if an outer electronic field. This was supposed to be a future for nano registries...
It's a matter of size.
Electrons are big, light, fuzzy things, and the electric field goes out a long way. When you want to make circuitry REALLY small you don't want to use that for anything but holding your pieces together, because your gates and wiring would have to be very large to avoid crosstalk.
But atoms are effectively smaller than electrons. The nuclei are MUCH smaller, and they suck their electrons down, making most of the fields cancel out at after a very short distance. And they're heavier, so they don't shake around and flit around as much.
You can send a bit, or several bits, by sliding or rotating a rod as you can by shoving electrons into and out of a wire (even a single-molecule wire), and the signal stays IN the rod except where you WANT it to "come out". At atomic scales moving a rod is nearly as fast as moving an electron (and comparable to moving a hole), so speed isn't a problem.
As for amplification there's not much that can beat an "interposer". That's a piece of matter that gets between a two moving parts and transfers a shove from the one supplying motion "power" to the one carrying a signal away as motion. Expend a little power to put the interposer into position and it will transfer shoves (with no further input) until you pull it away again.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
So the real message is more of a flame of Hooke, yet most people consider it some great admission of humility.
In case you missed it, I must refer you to another post by pmc in this thread that points to an very interesting article that refutes your conclusion fairly decisively.
Where does one draw the line between useful information and cool things to talk about at a party?
Knowledge does not have to be either useful or cool in order to be valuable.
One common approach is that of Cardinal Newman in the Idea of a University: Knowledge is capable of being its own end. Such is the constitution of the human mind, that any kind of knowledge, if it be really such, is its own reward.
The other common approach is to follow Socrates' dictim that "The unexamined life is not worth living", which he derived from his belief that ignorance causes evil.
These approaches still leave unanswered the question of where you draw the line between learning and other activities, knowledge being infinite and time being short.
I submit that there is no line. Learning includes close observation of things around you. In this way you integrate a love learning with everyday life and test the ideas acquired in solitary study.
Despite the fact that most great scientists have been more motivated by the love of learning than anything else, I've found that people who insist that knowledge must have a utilitarian purpose cannot be convinced otherwise.
Of course, that was way back in the 60's, er 1960's. I actually got to work with a computer in 1973 (HP2000 timesharing monstrosity running basic connected to dialup teletypes -- we got a DECwriter the next year, whee, 300 bps!) and experienced punched cards when I started my Comp. Sc. Degree program in 1979 -- we had DECwriters there too, and a few CRT terminals (at the end of current loop lines at, you guessed it, 300 bps), but course work had to be done via punched cards, submitted to the "express" window. You only had to wait 15-30 minutes for your job to get turned around.
I remember those days quite well. Today, I sometimes interview recent grads for software design jobs. One standard problem I pose is "Write a routine, in any programming language of your choice (I've probably seen it), that sorts an array of things according to some ordering scheme. I don't care about efficiency, but I expect the following: (a) that it is correct, (b) that you can explain the complexity of the algorithm in "O(n)" notation." Of course I expect a bubble sort of integers. One smartass did a Shell sort and got it right. But over 90% of the candidates fail this basic test. That's sad.
The scary part is that peer reviewers think this is being "too hard" on a candidate. Or worse, I remember one kid who added "servlets" to an FTP server -- basically he provided an API for command plug-ins that executed server-side and could provide massaged data back to the client. So, for example, you could do back-end SQL queries via FTP. Obviously an excercise in program extensibility. Trouble is, he didn't even get an offer -- a coworker insisted that he must have been "bullshitting" because "everyone knows that servlets are a Java thing and not an FTP thing". My protests got voted down. So, technical ignorance has permeated even the supposed technical interview -- on the part of the interviewers! Shortly after losing that battle, I left the employ of that company.
I remember building memory boards for an old SWTPC computer (none of us geek kids could afford to buy them assembled). I remember lamenting when the IBM PC booted into ROM Basic and displayed "Ready" -- who's gonna know how the computer gets to that point? that was what, almost 20 years ago?
There is hope. I often see young (say, under 20 years old) posters here who do have a clue. I envy that they have far better tools than I did as a kid, but note that these same "better tools" make it no big deal to be a script kiddie techno-vandal. Compare the history of mass computing to the history of the car. Anyone can drive a car today. Few know how to fix one or what makes it run, But, even with the ease of "turn the key, push on the gas, and remember to steer" driving, some still hack their cars. I take that as a sign that hacking doesn't die -- the computer hacker was a rare breed in the 1970s and still is despite the fact that there are a lot of 'leet wannabees around without a clue.
My advice to the young hacker is to seek out other hackers, young and old (say 40 and up), and avoid the wannabees. Of course, this implies a willingness and responsibility on the part of us "old guys" to mentor -- sure, you don't need a fast sort, or balanced tree structure, when you've got a 1 Ghz processor, but imagine how much faster and scalable your code will be if you use one. In my day, RAM was fast, and disk was S L O W, so you carefully designed your algorithms to minimize disk access. These days, you want stuff to stay locked in processor cache 'cause RAM is slow, by comparison. Look at other "hobies", like HAM radio, and see how "the torch gets passed on" there. We should strive for similar effect.
You could've hired me.
I am of the opposite opinion - that you can't know too much about the history of computing and computer science if you want to be a better programmer. Want to know why adding programmers to a late software project makes it later? Read Brooks. Are there some problems which are not solvable by computer? Study Turing. How does entropy and communications work? Shannon tells all. How and why does LISP do what it does so well? Check out the history of AI research. Does Babbage's engine really work? Hell yes - there's a working model at the Science Museum in London. Seeing it in action was practically a religious experience for me. Why does Unix use pipes? Check out the history of it at Bell Labs online.
You could say that all of these examples could just as well be studied theoretically. But then you'd miss the fun parts - like the story behind IBM's development of OS/360 and how some companies still haven't learned those lessons.
History is full of these amazing guys (and gals - hello Grace) that met and solved all kinds of problems, often in surprising and non-intuitive ways. Many of the anecdotes and broader perspectives do help you with programming if only to teach you something from history. Your Babbage example is a good one.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
You should not feel stupid for not knowing who these people are (or were). You should just consider your education in that area incomplete. Your intellectual curiousity should be troubled by that incompleteness. The same intellectual curiosity that led you to learn "how to fix computers" in the first place. And since it was, in part, the pioneering of these people that made possible the very existence of the computers you found interesting and challenging enough to learn how to fix, I'd say that they're due from you some modicum of respect and admiration.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I wrote a report for a Philosophy of Mathematics class in college that may be relevant for this discussion. Babbage is commonly thought of as more of an engineer than a scientist. And his efforts were largely directed to building a mechanical device that exceeded the manufacturing capabilities of the day. As well, the immediate precursors to the Analytic Engine -- the Jacquard Loom and the Difference Engine -- were specialized for narrow, practical purposes.
However, if you examine his writings, you'll realize that he had lofty mathematical goals for the analytic engine. Specifically, he understood it to be an exercise in defining what moderns might call 'effective computability'. There's a striking similarity in his pursuit of this goal and the same explorations by Hilbert, Turing, Church, etc., in the twentieth cetury. At least that's what I argued in my paper.
I recommend his notebooks and the few existing biographies to those with a taste for the history of science and the biography of scientists.
PS: One other conclusion that I drew from my research was that the role of Ada Lovelace in developing the abstract principles of computer science has been highly overstated. She was probably mathematically adept. But she also lead an outrageous (for the time) life. The illegitimate, unmarried, and independently wealthy daughter of a Romantic poet. I suspect Mr. Babbage (Sir Charles?) entertained and amused her, both in his glum disposition and willingness to engage her intellectually. And we owe her a death for her record of and commentary on his actions. But I seriously doubt she originated the grand ideas commonly attributed to her.
The Difference Engine number two was ahead of its time, indeed. In a head to head polynomial calculation test with a Windows-based Canon BJ Notebook BN22 (with built-in ink-jet printer), the mechanical Difference Engine initially beat the pants off the laptop, but was then overtaken. Not bad for a technology that was concieved around 160 years before its competitor.
From this account, we find the following description from a witness:
"...With the windows overhead slugging the Canon, the additional time taken for 31-digit extended precision arithmetic, and the printer buffer soaking up results before making them visible to the race referees, the Babbage engine produced nine 31-digit results before the Canon bubble jet printer blasted off the starting blocks. It then spewed out the first 50 results in little more than the time for the Babbage machine to produce one more result. The hare finally overtook the tortoise."
Wow! Not bad for a version 2.0 product. Consider the advancements it would have made had Babbage been successful all those years before.
It hurts all of mankind.
Does it hurt you to be unaware of who first thought of writing numbers as digits? The genius who came up with reliable procedures for adding them? The spectacular genius who generalized expression of fractions by numbers?
You know, I sit here in my office - knowing that outside my window, thousands of miles away, people are dying: Some by war, some by famine, some by sheer ignorance. Furthermore, I know that in some cases, these deaths and sufferings are occuring because of the ignorance and lack of understanding of others...
We humans should know at least where these things came from, if not specific identities. For example, I know that the first two things you mentioned, "Numbers as Digits" and "Adding Digits" most likely came from the Middle East, and that our word for Algebra comes from "the Arabic al-jabr". As for the last one, it pains me not to know where it came from, I am certain I could find it with a bit of googling, but I wouldn't doubt it came from the same region as well. Much of the math you speak of actually goes further back, but it is to the Middle East we must look to for our number system and for the number zero (0). These contributions are nothing short of amazing.
In a similar fashion, I tend to wonder how many people in the Middle East are aware of various contributions of Western society's great thinkers, scientists, philosophers, teachers, mathematicians, and medical doctors? How many of them are aware of things they might use every day, without which their standard of living would surely be lower than what it is today (I am thinking of things like automobiles and electricity, basic medicine, and engineering).
These things should bring us together - to cause us all, on every corner of the planet to think "We are human, we have made these things!". We should rightly be humbled by greater men than ourselves, and should strive to be like them or better. We should be proud that we, as humans, have explored our solar system and beyond! That we have stepped foot on another world, beyond our mere Earth.
I think of the photos of the Earth-rise captured by cameras that man invented, hand carried to another world in machines and suits built by man to keep him alive in a world utterly inhospitable to himself, daring it to take his life so that he could step down, and take one picture...
A picture - a world so fragile - and small - holding, as far as we know (though we, as men, dream - yes, we dream - of more...), all the life in the universe...
You know, as I just wrote this, I cried - I know I can't do anything about what is going on in this world - and I know that none of you can, either - not directly. I know that there are people that just don't care. I guess this is why I cried - because despite all of that mankind has achieved - from everything small to everything great - there are still individuals who exist who seem to be unable to look past their own petty self-interests and dream of the possibilities...
Maybe I am just a romantic optimist...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon