Jun
5
Difference of the Engine
Filed Under Thinkers
There’s a great article on Wired.com about Charles Babbage and Ada Byron, aka the two people who invented computer hardware and computer software, respectively. Their relationship started professionally when Byron translated one of Babbage’s articles, and he was quite impressed. The man was a much better mathematician than he was a writer. Meanwhile, Byron was increasing the size of Babbage’s articles by upwards of 300% (wordy lady) and including her own thoughts, predicting that “a computing machine could compose music, draw graphics and find application, so to speak, in business and science.”
Babbage invented the difference engine, capable of calculating relatively simple mathematical calculations (though, I can’t comprehend the sorta thing), which he never physically built (though, it was recently completed as per his specs. It works).
My mind briefly wandered to Gibson and Sterling’s joint novel, The Difference Engine. I hated it, and I’ve read every other Gibson book at least twice. It was dull, uninspired, and lacked the atmosphere that Gibson was known for.
Something that was inspired, however, was Babbage’s Analytical engine (also uncompleted in his lifetime). The general idea was to build a computer (sans quad-core cpus) that could be programmed using punch cards. Byron herself wrote a program that, had t he analytical engine ever been built, would’ve been allowed the engine to calculate a series of Bernoulli numbers. They have something to do with negative integers. Probably fascinating stuff if you’re deep into XKCD.
On his own Babbage might have been seen as a mad fool hell bent on constructing machines that had no use, but with Byron’s ability to develop and translate is complex ideas as well as actually design the code to prove his machine’s worth, they end up becoming the stuff of legend, “Mr Hardware and Ms Software”. They met on this day for the first time in 1833.
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