What If Babbage Had Succeeded?

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."

Comments

Re:"what if" game

[MightyMartian]

Yes and no. Mechanical computers do not have the scalability of electronic computers, to be sure, so that line of development would have reached its end.

At the same time, having a Turing complete computer, even a mechanical one, in the first half of the 19th century would have given mathematicians and engineers a whole new grammar to begin working on, much as even the relatively primitive digital computers of the 1940s to 1960s spurred on an absolutely astonishing amount of R&D, some of it still bearing fruit today.

I expect that if the Babbage machines had been built and had been put to use, they would have spurred the digital revolution nearly a century earlier, concentrating huge amounts of R&D by the Great Powers in the post-Napoleonic era. The military value, for instance, of fast and accurate cannon/mortar trajectory calculations would have given whoever developed such machines a considerable edge. The late 19th-early 20th century arms race was transformative in many ways, and the successors of Babbage's machines would have been caught up in that.