Today, I’ve posted the project on which I’ve been working (and hence hunkered down and largely invisible) for the last month: the 2017 edition of The Analytical Engine. In the 19th century, Charles Babbage imagined and invented a steam-powered mechanical apparatus which anticipated almost every aspect of modern computers. In 1997, I published on the Web a collection of original documents about Babbage’s invention, along with an emulator, written in Java, which allowed people to experience programming this machine, which was never actually built. (It is the founding member of the Victorian Brass Vapourware Club.)
Well, foolish me, I happened to buy into a vapourware fad just as delusional and much more expensive for all involved, Java applets, the stake through whose heart has just been driven by Firefox dropping support for them in version 52 and Oracle announcing that they are ending support for the browser plug-in which supports them.
Time passes. We age. Stuff stops working. So it goes.
The new release, documented here, replaces the Java applet with HTML5 and JavaScript, which, being adopted W3C standards, will probably be at least 2.72% more persistent than the last fickle fad of Java applets.
To get a feel for steampunk computing, go to the sample programs page and try running some of them (just click on the “gears” icon, then scroll down and press the “Start” button in the emulator). When a program is done, press the “Timing” button under the Attendant’s Log for an estimate of how long the mechanical Analytical Engine would have taken to run the program.
I don’t know why the image in this post on the main page is blurry. The original image is much higher resolution (429×479 pixels) and it shows up sharply on the post’s page. WordPress….
I am still using half-inch dowels for image rendering.
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At least it’s not ten penny nails!
Hey, I saw this. Why does ten pennies get nailed?
better they get hammered.
Are you still angry about that indelible red ink on my collar, Pencil?
I have no idea what you are talking about, John, but, folks, we got it and that other place didn’t.
wElcome John!
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That means ‘like x 2’.
Welcome, John W.
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Brent, once again you have fallen down on the job.
Wait, what?
Dime, I’ve never pretended to be as smart as I am good looking.
John, was it a giant adding machine or did it use logarithms like a slide rule? What calculations was it used for? Arithmetic only?
Is there a good book on this?
It was a giant four-function calculator, programmable by cards. It had 50 digits of precision in calculations and 1000 storage locations of 50 digits each. By appropriately clever programming, you could compute most things a modern computer could.
The best book on it is my own site:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/
I need to read up on this.
Do you mean punch cards?
This is interesting because with those functions one could do a whole lot. Did he have a way to make a hard copy?
I take it that it was not binary but base ten.
Yes, programming was by punch cards. The technology had already been proven by Jacquard cards for automated looms.
Part of the design was an apparatus which could directly engrave printing plates for producing tables used for calculation and navigation. Babbage appreciated that as many errors were introduced in typesetting as in calculation.
The Analytical Engine worked in base 10. Babbage considered other bases, but concluded that since the people who used the tables thought in base 10, it would make sense to use it. The designers of the UNIVAC I made the same choice.
Besides Madame DeFarge had anyone thought of weaving things into a hard copy.
A: Do you have the results?
B: Yes, I will show you the cloth and you can look at it for yourself.
C: Here, you can get a good look if you step over by the guillotine where the light’s better.
What a revolutionary idea, Vald.