Author: Elizabeth Schwartz
Date: 08:52:30 03/02/01
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On March 01, 2001 at 22:36:54, Robert Hyatt wrote: >On February 28, 2001 at 22:11:21, Pete Galati wrote: >>That's pretty impressive. Not only the autographed picture, but building the >>thing with relays. The thing must have been sort of noisy. I wonder >> how well the thing's construction is documented. >> >No idea. I was impressed someone could even build such a thing in 1949. Seems >almost impossible.. :) I'm sure it was written up somewhere... Charles Babbage put a lot of time, effort, and money into building a *general-purpose* mechanical computer , more than a hundred years before this. Ada Lovelace worked extensively with him on developing algorithms. There's a long history here: http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/ and a photo here: http://home.clara.net/clara.net/m/y/c/mycetes/webspace/babbage/ Babbage's machines, the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine, never worked, but that was partially because the milling techniques of the time were not precise enough to give him the mechanical parts he needed, and partly because he was an incurable tinkerer who kept revising his design. There were others who made similar machines work. There's a great display of mechanical calculating machines in the London science museum. Today, people have built mechanical computers out of tinkertoys. The principles of digital logic are the same, whether stored in a silicon bit, a large ring magnet, or a big wooden tinkertoy that flips left and right. The first mechanical computers were used to solve polynomials and other fixed equations. Simple chess endgames might be on that order of magnitude - a whole chess game would of course require a much MUCH larger machine. In principle, you could make it work. In practice, you'd be faceed with the same problems of maintaining precision that Babbage had Betsy Of course, c
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