Jon "maddog" Hall
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Jon "maddog" Hall has not written any posts yet.
Jon "maddog" Hall has not written any posts yet.
Overall it was a very good and fun article. I liked the interspersing of math, logic and computers.
It seemed to be very USA focused, and missed a lot of the work done in other countries, especially the work of Konrad Zuse and things like the ACE computer in England.and the EDSAC (the first computer to store its program in its own memory) designed by my friend, Sir Maurice Wilkes..but to cover all that would probably go on to fill tomes if printed out.
You also missed out on the Colossus Computer, designed and built by Tommy Flowers at Bletchley Park as part of the famous code breaking operation of WW II. I... (read more)
Actually Charles Babbage was not trying to disrupt the industry of printed logarithmic tables, he was trying to print accurate tables. His difference engine included a mechanism to transfer the calculated tables directly to a print plate so there would be no transcription errors between the calculated numbers and going to the printer.
Babbage's work on the engine started when he was working with another engineer doing calculations in parallel as was often done in those days. They did one set of calculations and got different answers. They retried the calculations and each got their same answer, but again they were different. Then they looked at the values in the... (read more)
I will point out that while there are some things that can never be computed (the last digit of Pi or e come to mind) there are also classes of these problems that can be calculated "close enough for all practical purposes". If it was not for that consideration, we would be missing a lot of great engineering feats.