Imagine the World Today...

[OldManC]

If computers had taken off when they were actually invented...



http://www.i-programmer.info/babbages-bag/304-what-if-babbage.html

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.

I read this last week and am still blown away by it. Over the years I've found it funny that each generation seems to think it's figured out something that their fathers couldn't have dreamed of. We may have access to improved materials and technology but the brains that ask the questions and then find the answers seem to have been around all along.

[Dave W]

Yet another reason patents should be abolished. Very few inventions and innovations are really new.

Speaking of computers, how's this for hardware? One of those babies would hold a little over 2 minutes of music at 320 kbps.

[fur85]

Interesting to think about what would be different today if computers had been invented earlier. I like the retronaut site too.

[Rob]

Just think.  They had to spend at least a paragraph describing the term 5 Meg.
Do you think the size of that machine is what took Pan Am down?

[gweimer]

I've always wondered whether Jules Verne was actually a visionary, or if people didn't read his books and say, "hey, I can do that".

It's like those books that predicted the cars and buildings of the future.  You have to wonder if someone didn't take what was drawn and just decided to run with that.

[Dave W]

Just think.  They had to spend at least a paragraph describing the term 5 Meg.
Do you think the size of that machine is what took Pan Am down?

Imagine trying carry your iPod around! It would take 400 of those for a 2GB iPod shuffle.

[OldManC]

I've always wondered whether Jules Verne was actually a visionary, or if people didn't read his books and say, "hey, I can do that"...

I thought of him while reading this article.

Dave, I'm sitting here with around 12TB of storage in various drives just in my home office. I don't even want to think of the amount of space I would have needed (to do my line of work) when that picture was taken. Hell, even the 20GB of memory in my work Mac would have taken a warehouse!

[Highlander]

This was thought through in the book "The Difference Engine" by Bill Gibson and Bruce Serling - an interesting alternate history... often cited as the birth of "SteamPunk" - Gibson (don't you just love that name) is credited with the birth of "CyperPunk", the illegitimate grandson of Phillip K Dick...

Didn't someone actually build one with modern materials and proved that Babbage actually got it right..?

[OldManC]

Didn't someone actually build one with modern materials and proved that Babbage actually got it right..?

Sounds like it's been done and will be done again:

...In 1910 his son, Henry P Babbage, built a large hand-operated calculator plus printer based on the CPU of the analytical engine - and it worked.

Now,170 years after Babbage drafted his original plans for the Analytical Engine, author, journalist and computer scientist  John Graham-Cumming has an embarked on an ambitious, but realistic project to build one for public display. It is called Plan 28, is reference to the extensive documentation which Babbage left  in a mahogany case that Babbage had constructed especially for the purpose.

Graham-Cumming enlisted the help of Doron Swade, who, as curator of computing at the Science Museum in London, masterminded the  building ofd the Difference Engine and as a preliminary step towards Plan 28 the the Science Museum has begun to digitise Babbage's entire archive of plans and notes.