Researchers Are Reconstructing Babbage's Analytical Engine (plan28.org)

Slashdot reader RockDoctor brings an update on a project to build Babbage's Analytical Engine: Between 1822 and 1847, Charles Babbage worked on a number of designs for general-purpose programmable computing engines, some parts of which were built during his lifetime and after. Since 2011 a group under the name of "Plan-28" have been working towards building a full version of the machine known as the Analytical Engine. (The group's name refers to the series of Babbage's plans which they are working to -- versions 1 to 27 obviously having problems.) This week, they've released some updates on progress on their blog. Significant progress includes working on the machine's "internal microcode" (in today's terminology; remember, this is a machine of brass cogs and punched cards!) [and] archive work to bring the Science Museum's material into a releasable form (the material is already scanned, but the metadata is causing eyestrain). "One of the difficulties in understanding the designs is the need to reverse engineer logical function from mechanical drawings of mechanisms -- this without textual explanation of purpose or intention..." Progress is slow, but real.

Last year marked the bicentennial of Ada Lovelace, who wrote programs for the Analytical Engine and it's predecessor, the Difference Engine, and whose position as "the world's first programmer" is celebrated in the name of the programming language Ada.

Comments

Re:The world's first programmer...

[AthanasiusKircher]

So a man discovers computers, a women figured out how to do a diddly on it, and we celebrate her as the first programmer without calling him the first programmable machine inventor.

Typical Feminism, and these days, Typical Slashdot.

Umm... huh? From TFS:

Between 1822 and 1847, Charles Babbage worked on a number of designs for general-purpose programmable computing engines, some parts of which were built during his lifetime and after.

That sounds like we start TFS by recognizing Babbage's contributions for designing these "programmable computing engines." And, just in case that's not enough for you, there's a link to the Wikipedia article on Babbage right in that sentence in TFS which acknowledges in its opening paragraph that Babbage: "...is best remembered for originating the concept of a programmable computer."

So, I'm really not sure how you get that Slashdot is somehow recognizing Lovelace without acknowledging Babbage's contributions.

Can we get past a week here without our allotted dosage of this bullshit for fucking once?

Ada Lovelace did some interesting stuff. She was an interesting person. And she's mentioned in the summary because Slashdot had a story on her bicentennial last year. Babbage's bicentennial was in 1991... but should we celebrate him this year too even though it's just his bicenquasquigenary (a term 99.9% of people haven't even heard of, because we generally don't celebrate 225 year anniversaries)? Would that make you happier?

Re:raspberry pi

[MightyMartian]

But not nearly as historically significant. Babbage designed the world's first Turing complete computer, and if he could have had the parts machined in his day, the computer revolution would have kicked off a half a century earlier. Just imagine the Internet in WWII, all those Nazi hackers and astroturfers,

Re:The world's first programmer...

[MightyMartian]

Lovelace was a woman, and to the Libertarian Neanderthals that frequent Slashdot, that means mentioning her is a violation of some sort of sense of maleness. There are just a lot of very angry men out there, and any time anything is attributed to a woman, they literally start foaming at the mouth, shouting "SJW". They're a rather pathetic lot who, I suspect, don't spend very much time around women, or possibly other humans at all. They can be safely ignored however, they are a shrinking demographic.