Old and New Babbage Engine

British Museum:please use for education, just acknowledge chee@hawaii.edu
New version with audio and higher res at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrAW2hemp-g

Category:

Travel & Events

Tags:

• babbage
• british
• museum
• analog
• computing
• beginings
• lady
• ada
• chee
• ancl
• history
• historical

[georgH]

I was at this museum two weeks ago. What a pity they don't do demonstrations of the Difference Engine n.2 anymore. They are building a copy.

20/08/2007

[advnetlab]

They didn't do demonstrations when I was there either. I bribed the guy with a bag of Kona Coffee (30 pound sterling at harrods at the time) The copy was done when I was there, but the printer wasn't quite finished. The cool part is that the copy worked, and would have worked in Sir Charles' day if he had been able to get better materials and machine tools.

/brian chee

[georgH]

>The copy was done when I was there,

>but the printer wasn't quite finished.

Hi, I think we used <i>copy</i> with different meanings: you referred to the first Difference Engine n.2 and I was referring to the copy of this that they're doing for another museum. ;)

[advnetlab]

ah! Busy aren't they?

Being an academic, I've always wanted some footage to show classes that I didn't have to worry about copyrights on....so when I had the opportunity, it was put up or shut up...so that's why I'm only asking for credit. As long as it's used for educational purposes, I'm fine with it.

So now that editing technology has improved, this time I'm hoping the audio comes out so that you can hear the gears churning away. Quite the clacking as the registers shift.

[robbyrne22]

what a machine!

[advnetlab]

oh by the way, you can barely see it, but there is a gutenburg style printer attached to the unit. It drops metal slugs into a try to print out the ballistics tables it was designed to produce.

/brian chee

[gobacktorussia]

the difference engine is spectacular, although i can not find a decent explination of how it works. ofcourse im sure its not the easiest mechanism to explain, though i would like a bit more information as to how it calculates and how it is programmed?

how complex an equasion can it calculate?

i would love to take a look at the original blueprints

[wilsonces]

Glad to see it was finally built. Even if it's not the final design. We will have some record for the future that's not magnetic data, stored on an ipod. Carried on the hip. And dependant on mains power. Roll on december 2012.

[mopalia]

Yes, sure. We ran it quite a bit just today. And the same person who built the Meccano versions was on the team that did the monthly maintenance on the Babbage engine today.

[mopalia]

It works just fine,, and it was built using the same tolerances that Babbage used, as well as the same materials. If they had completed it in his lifetime, it would have worked. I know, because we just finished oiling and greasing #2 (as in Difference Engine #2, #2, this morning. It works just the way Babbage intended.

[gonzo1275]

...I mean Mountain View.

[gonzo1275]

Thanks for the info! I'll have to go there next time I'm in the bay area. I lived there for 7 years and had no idea there was Computer History Museum in Menlo Park!

[mopalia]

If you're in the US, there's one in California until April, 2009, at the Computer History Museum.

[NoStrangerOpening]

A marvel of engineering

[influenza99]

Agreed. Turing is rivalled only by Newton and Einstein. Too bad is not better known. I suspect this is because of the top secret nature of much of his work.

Only when you understand the enormity of the problem that was laid at Turings feet can you begin to understand the enormity of his genious.

Even with a modern day super-computer, it would be difficult to calculate how many lives Turing saved.

[influenza99]

I think Apple Computers name is a homage to Isaac Newton. Further proof of this may be Apple's Newton MessagePad...the first PDA device.