babbage

Whether Babbage could or couldn't write them isn't, to my knowledge, recorded (presumably he could if he wanted to).

The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer is a short book but also a fun read.

Figures like Turing and Babbage certainly have mythic stature, but don't seem quite right.

It is recorded that Babbage more or less had to spoon feed her.

I've even contacted the archivist at the Charles Babbage Institute because the information I wanted was only available there.

More precisely, Lady Lovelace wrote programs for the machine Babbage designed.

I saw the Babbage machine when it was first built at the Science Museum.

It's an incredible book for plenty of other reasons, including discussions of West African talking drums, Charles Babbage & Ada Lovelace, and plenty of other things.

A few hundred years into the future, we're more likely to see Charles Babbage and Alan Turing in text books than Gates and Jobs.

For a long time (perhaps they still do?) they had a working version of the babbage engine, a circa 1850s six ton mechanical calculator built to solve polynomials [2].

I love computers, software, and the people who made it possible, from Jacquard to Turing via Babbage and their heirs, friends, emulators, and more.

The British Engineer Charles Babbage (Father of the Computer in many respects) wasn't afforded the opportunity to complete the first working mechanical calculator because of cost restrictions by the British Gov't, an invention which could have altered the British course in History.

Babbage..."), then the magic wore off and mechanical buttons were still what got things done, now we're headed for "what's a mechanical button"...

From Wikipedia: "After the Science Museum in London successfully built the computing section of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine #2 in 1991, Myhrvold funded the construction of the output section, which performs both printing and stereotyping of calculated results.

That'd make it a kind of ancestor to digital computers, before various automata and then Jacquard and Babbage.

In the future, saying computers will almost definitely make people think Gates, not Babbage.

The interesting thing about the Difference Engine was that it was Babbage's unrealized design.