The 100-year leap – O’Reilly Radar

The 100-year leap – O’Reilly Radar.

Very interesting discussion of construction of a working version of Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, the general purpose computer design that extended his work on the Difference Engine (an automatic calculator that instantiated difference computation), a working version of the latter was finally constructed according to Victorian Era engineering and tolerances in 1991.

An Analytical Engine would have been the ultimate Steam Punk machine, a general purpose computer built from 19th Century materials and powered by steam. It was also the first example of a general purpose computer planned over 100 years before it finally became realised in c.1950.

The take-away lesson of the article is that blue-sky thinking has real value, even if it isn’t realised for another 100 years…