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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.
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.
What happened to timothy and yaelk? Has anyone noticed that they haven't posted any srories in over a month?
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Linux user
And it does run Linux, because it's Turing Complete. Just....very....slowly
Table-ized A.I.
But... why? A raspberry pi is cheaper and much more powerful...
...surely didn't appear until computers appeared.
Ezekiel 23:20
Join GNAA (GAY lube is wiped oof for Nthe state of Moans and groans came as a complete 'superior' machine.
The Byron family was prolific, including Mary Shelley (Frankenstein), Lord Byron, Lady Ada, and others. These are my predecessors, so including being a cousin of Frankenstein, I guess I am also a cousin of the world's first computer! And then, I am a software and electrical engineer... :-)
Charles Babbage's "Difference Engine" created much controversy in its time, but his equally ingenious "Indifference Engine" was received with... "meh".
...in reality, the program was not her doing. For years a controversy has raged about the degree of participation of Babbage in the notes of Lovelace. It is a complicated controversy due to the fact that, according to what Woolley said to OpenMind, perhaps people have tried “to make Ada’s contribution a gender issue.
But today it seems clear that it was Babbage, not Lovelace, who was the first programmer. The computer historian Doron Swade, a prominent world expert on the work of Babbage, settles the controversy with new data presented at the symposium now taking place at the University of Oxford to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Lovelace, and reveals a sneak preview to OpenMind: “I confirm that the manuscript evidence clearly shows that Babbage wrote ‘programs’ for his Analytical Engine in 1836-7 i.e. 6-7 years before the publication of Lovelace’s article in 1843. There are about 24 of such ‘programs’ and they have the identical features of the Lovelace’s famous ‘program’,” adds Swade. The historian says that the new tests are “unarguable” and that they “do not support, indeed they contradict the claim that Lovelace was the ‘first programmer’.”
It was never built in the first place, so it can't be "reconstructed".
The closest traditional mathematical model to a physical computer is a linear bounded automaton (LBA), which is a Turing machine unable to move the head outside an area proportional to input size. It recognizes context-sensitive languages.
Can you imagine though, if the Analytical Engine had been built? Would the British government have understood it enough to make effective use of it? How many would get built? Would other countries (Germany perhaps) recognize a competitive threat and build their own? Or steal plans for the original?
One imagines the earliest engineers, programmers, even Babbage and Ada Lovelace, realizing they need to increase the cycle time of the device. They could have connected early steam engines to the input crank to achieve that. Then the AE breaks because they stress it too much, so the AE undergoes a round of upgrades to make it mechanically more durable.
Eventually they get some decent programs going and grow to depend upon the device. Version 2 follows but they have huge problems upgrading and all their programs are incompatible. Everything we experience today, just 100 years prior.
I imagine it would be much like the early days of the mainframe. They would be inventing and using tech as they went. Finally electronics are invented and a whole cadre of early programmers resent the new technology and point out all the things mechanical computers can do that electronic ones cannot do!
Hey idiots, think that concept will ever sink into your rock-like skulls?
One of the more interesting things I remember from a video about the construction of the difference engine was the introduction of deliberate errors. Apparently the engineering drawings included deliberate errors in key pieces so that if they were fabricated as drawn, it would jam the machine up badly. This was in case someone stole or copied the plans but plays hell with constructing one today.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables