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:raspberry pi

[DarkOx]

I don't know about the prospects for the Internet. Mechanical computers and later electro-mechanical computers are likely as far as anyone would have got. Its really the transistor that gives you computation that is fast enough to run complex packet switch protocols and gives you signaling properties that are conducive to long ranger "high speed" communications.

I am not sure having computer technology sooner would have accelerated the development of the transistor or digital logic gates. There simply were not enough people running around with a deep enough understanding of physics to work out semiconductors.

That said we saw how instrumental even "slow" electro-mechanical machines were in applications like code braking, as well as sorting and cataloging. Certainly teletext was an important form of communication and operated on the same principles. I am sure machines would have been applied to artilary targeting, more communications, more ciphering and encryption. It would no doubt have been a very different war, but I don't think a pre-WWII Internet could have been possible.

Re:Difference Engine

[dpilot]

My wife and I recently went to England with friends, and one of our stops was at the London Science Museum to see the Babbage Difference Engine #2. (with built-in printer) I wasn't aware that there were enough drawings generated to even attempt the Analytical Engine.