Building a 5-Ton Calculator From 19th-Century Plans

alphadogg writes "Starting in May, many will have the opportunity to see computing done the old-fashioned way: with lots of gears, a big crank, and some muscle. The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, will unveil a new construction, the first in the US, of the 19th-century British mathematician Charles Babbage's Difference Engine No. 2, an improved version of his earlier design for a mechanical digital calculator. It weighs in at two tons more than the Difference Engine built in 1991 at London's Science Museum. Microsoft millionaire Nathan Myhrvold commissioned and paid for the US model."

Comments

Architecture

[WilburCobb]

Will it run linux?

Times likes these...

[billy901]

It's times like these when I appreciate my my TI83 weighing in at about 12 ounces. It may be seemingly complicated to do graphs and hard fuctions, but it's damn smaller! (Plus, if you mod it enough, you can run Linux. A friend of mine actually did that!)