What if Babbage..? Written by Mike James.
What if the computer had been invented 100 years earlier, in Victorian times? This isn’t a silly idea. Charles Babbage had conceived of the basic principles of a stored digital computer in 1833 - and no I’m not talking of a glorified calculator. This was the real thing, CPU, memory and programs - and it could have been built. If you visit the Science Museum in London you can see a working model of Babbage’s “Difference Engine”. It looks like a beautiful work of precision engineering and yet it was built using engineering tolerances that were available at the time. Babbage never built his difference engine, although others did build machines like it during his life time. http://www.i-programmer.info/babbages-bag/304-what-if-babbage.html _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
