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What If Babbage Had Succeeded?

Posted by Soulskill on from the steampunk-personal-computing dept.

mikejuk writes "It was on this day 220 years ago (December 26 1791) that Charles Babbage was born. The calculating machines he invented in the 19th century, although never fully realized in his lifetime, are rightly seen as the forerunners of modern programmable computers. What if he had succeeded? Babbage already had plans for game arcades, chess playing machines, sound generators and desktop publishing. A Victorian computer revolution was entirely possible."

4 of 212 comments (clear)

  1. We'd be all programming in Ada right now by zill · · Score: 5, Funny

    Just think of all the possibilities...

  2. Then.. by Haedrian · · Score: 5, Funny

    1800 would have been the year of Linux on the Desktop.

    1. Re:Then.. by zill · · Score: 5, Funny

      Sucks for Linus I guess, getting kidnapped by a bunch of time traveling Victorian thugs.

  3. Here's TFA by rgbrenner · · Score: 5, Funny

    Very interesting read. Here's a complete copy of the article for anyone who's interested:

    Catchable fatal error: Argument 1 passed to TeraWurfl::addTopLevelSettings() must be an array, null given, called in /home/iprogr6/public_html/plugins/mobile/terawurfl/TeraWurfl.php on line 334 and defined in /home/iprogr6/public_html/plugins/mobile/terawurfl/TeraWurfl.php on line 463