Babbage's Dream Comes True

10 important questions on Babbage's Dream Comes True

Which two calculating machines did Babbage invent?

The Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine. Babbage never built a full scale Difference engine because in 1833 he abandoned it for the Analytical Engine.

What is the difference between the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine?

The difference engine could only produce mathematical tables and the analytical engine any mathematical computation. Key point of the analytical engine was the separation of arithmetic computation from the storage of numbers. To solve this problem he used the Jacquard Loom, general purpose device.

What is the function of the Jacquard Loom general purpose device?

It was introduced by a punched card machine and could weave infinite varieties of patterns.
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Babbage had funding problems. How did he try to solve these?

He tried to get funds for the analytical instead of the difference engine. The Duke of Wellington was more interested in the difference engine because the needed the tables. When Babbage asked fundings for the other machine, the stopt their entire financial support.

Babbage elaborated the design of the Analytical Engine on paper, but no one wanted this engine. What happened later?

Due to the invite of the Italian Scientific Academy in Turin, an account of the analytical engine was written by Luigi Menabrea, which was later translated and rewritten by Ada Byron.

Who is Ada Byron (1815-1852)?

She was pronounced as the word's first programmer and even had a programming language, Ada. The ideas were Babbage's, but she was clearly the voice in the sketch.

In 1834 Dionysius Lardner had described Babbage's difference Engine in the Edinburgh Review. What was the result?

Peter Georg Scheutz build the engine and named it the Scheutzian Calculating Engine. It was exhibited at the Paris Exposition and won the Gold Medal in its class. The following year it was purchased by different countries.

Difference Engines where largely abandoned. Why?

Because they were one-kind machines and not reliable and therefore they went back to use teams of human computers.

What is the dark age of digital computing?

When Charles Babbage spent his whole life perfecting the difference machine, but then it got replaced by human computers again. He knew there was no serious prospect. His failure is know as the dark age.

What is an example of a physical model/analog of a system?

The Orrery, a tabletop model of the planetary system, named after British Earl of Orrery. They were not used for practical computing because they were too inaccurate.

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