>>> I always joke that he forgot “The only way to have a future is to finish
>>> something” ;-)
“One of the sad memories of my life is a visit to the celebrated mathematician
and inventor, Mr Babbage. He was far advanced in age, but his mind was still as
vigorous as ever. He took me through his work-rooms. In the first room I saw
parts of the original Calculating Machine, which had been shown in an
incomplete state many years before and had even been put to some use. I asked
him about its present form.
‘I have not finished it because in working at it I came on the idea of my
Analytical Machine, which would do all that it was capable of doing and much
more. Indeed, the idea was so much simpler that it would have taken more work
to complete the Calculating Machine than to design and construct the other in
its entirety, so I turned my attention to the Analytical Machine.’”
“After a few minutes’ talk, we went into the next work-room, where he showed
and explained to me the working of the elements of the Analytical Machine. I
asked if I could see it. ‘I have never completed it,’ he said, ‘because I hit
upon an idea of doing the same thing by a different and far more effective
method, and this rendered it useless to proceed on the old lines.’ Then we went
into the third room. There lay scattered bits of mechanism, but I saw no trace
of any working machine. Very cautiously I approached the subject, and received
the dreaded answer, ‘It is not constructed yet, but I am working on it, and it
will take less time to construct it altogether than it would have token to
complete the Analytical Machine from the stage in which I left it.’ I took
leave of the old man with a heavy heart.”
– Lord Moulton
(and if someone says “but he invented the modern computer": No, he did not. We
know about him because Ada Lovelance helped him publishing theoretical results
(after removing lots of random ramblings about the evil
state of research funding). Babagge is *irrelevant* for today. He was
rediscovered later after people re-invented his computer. If he would have
finished (or just made sure to delegate it, being so trivial that should
have been really easy?) he truly would have changed *everything*.
“Sometimes you need to finish that damn trivial calculator” — me
Marcus
