

A £400,000 PC downgrade: Rebooting Babbage’s Analytical Engine - jgrahamc
http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2011/04/start/a-400000-pound-pc-downgrade

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jmah
Ah, I was confused, but now understand. The Computer History Museum has a
Difference Engine which calculates polynomials. The Analytical Engine has an
ALU and control flow, and is Turing-complete. The first Turing-complete
device, in fact.

<http://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_engine>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_Engine>

Best of luck to jgc!

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jgrahamc
Also <http://plan28.org/> has some details.

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michael_dorfman
Nicely done, jgc. I continue to be impressed by your ongoing efforts, and I'm
glad to see you're getting the press train rolling on this one as effectively
as you did with your Turing apology project.

~~~
jgrahamc
Thanks for the kind words. They mean a lot to me.

BTW Speaking of Turing there's a new documentary being worked on
(<http://turingfilm.com/>) and I spoke to the producer of "Breaking The Code"
and it looks like we'll manage to arrange a DVD release in time for 2012.

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JonnieCache
I remember seeing the difference engine as a child on a trip to the science
museum. I was awestruck at the time, both by the thing itself and by the fact
that _nobody had bothered to make the upgraded version!_ even when they
clearly recognised its importance enough to put bits of it in a museum.

Thanks jgc! Can't wait to go back there and see the whole analytical engine in
its full glory.

One thing: plan28.org is on the ever-growing list of websites that have left
the html5 boilerplate hot pink text selection color directive in their
stylesheets. Doesn't really go with the rest of the aesthetic. It seems that I
now see several sites each day with this left in there, its most amusing.

~~~
ChuckMcM
The difference engine was at least reasonably complete in its specification
and some small models had been built. Much of the Analytical engine's
description and design was still in the 'power point' stage, so there is
significant work to be done to figure out what Babbage was really thinking
when various parts of it need to be built.

Another key difference was that the difference engine was mostly the same
chunk replicated n times (one for each term of the polynomial) whereas the
analytical engine has many different kinds of subsystems.

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daniel-cussen
This is not the difference engine Nathan Myhrvold paid for.

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dhughes
> This article was taken from the April 2011 issue of Wired magazine.

No, it wasn't.

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T-hawk
It's been standard practice forever for magazines to date themselves anywhere
from one to twelve weeks in the future from the calendar date of physical
sale. Cars too, unless you claim that you can't buy a 2012 model car in July
2011 (hint: you can.)

Are you just complaining about the cover date or do you know something else
about the article's origins?

~~~
dhughes
I see that explanation when this happens but really whatever the reason, it's
weird, I still find it odd to do such a thing for news articles, cars or
whatever. [This comment was taken from July 2012]

