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It's Time To Build the Analytical Engine
macslocum writes "John Graham-Cumming is launching a project to finish Charles Babbage's dream and build an Analytical Engine for public display. The goal: inspire future generations of scientists to work on their own 100-year leaps."
Doron Swade who wrote "The Difference Engine" (the non-fiction book, not the steampunk fiction by Gibson and Sterling) can tell you this:
It's not possible to create The Analytical Engine. Why? Because Babbage never stopped creating the designs. There is no one clean, complete set of designs for the Analytical Engine.
If someone were to build it, they would first have to pick and choose from among Babbage's numerous sketches, then fill in any of the missing bits. It's not a true, 100% authentic, Babbage design, unlike the simpler Difference Engine, which had a clean set of engineering drawings for its creation.
Then its like Difference Engine Forever then?
Jacquard looms had been around for awhile and used punch cards to control how the machine operated. Likewise, changing the punch cards would allow for a different pattern to be made. However, these were by no means general purpose computers and were also not capable of preforming calculations.
Yes, that's why the first step is "Figure out what the Analytical Engine is". The idea is that they would look over old drawings, use them where they make sense, and fill in the missing bits with whatever would have been available at the time. It would be *an* Analytical Engine rather than *the* Analytical Engine.
dom
There is a great difference between somebody who had a great idea, but was overlooked and somebody who blew it.
Babbage was the latter.
When he showed people a small prototype of his difference engine, they knew exactly what kind of potential it had. The TFA even said that the government backed him. I'll stop the press and let that sink in. The British government knew at the time just what a game changer this could have been. What TFA article doesn't say is the extent to which they backed him. In the prices of the day, they invested the equivalent of a fully kitted out and manned battleship in the project. A battleship. What happened?
Babbage squandered the money, fell out with every metal-smith in the country capable of building the difference engine and committed the ultimate crime of changing his mind and plans time and time and time again. Sure, he had a lot of plans for the Analytical engine, but he couldn't stay focused/act civilly enough to build the machine everybody wanted to begin with. After such an investment and nothing to show for it, nobody would give him the time of day, let alone commission him to build an even more complex machine with an unfinished design.
It could be said, rather than a man who had a great idea that wasn't realised. Babbage had a great idea that he killed so badly via his own incompetence, nobody touched it for another 100 years.
Of course, you could use the Jacquard loom to print out Life patterns, then scan those back in and create a new set of Jacquard cards based on the next iteration of the pattern. With enough cells you could create a general purpose computer using glider guns for logic. Might be a bit slow though.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"