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If you're just scanning, it's not THE Difference Engine, it's a replica: >"To be clear, the museum's difference engine isn't an original built 160 years ago by

If you're just scanning, it's not THE Difference Engine, it's a replica: >"To be clear, the museum's difference engine isn't an original built 160 years ago by Babbage, but rather it is a working model painstakingly designed and assembled in the 1990s. ... The London Science Museum keeps one Babbage Engine on display, but its design team also assembled a second model for a private benefactor who financed the project. That donor, Nathan Myhrvold, a former Microsoft executive, originally loaned his Babbage Engine to the Mountain View Computer History Museum in 2008 with the idea to exhibit it for just six months."

FrankyHollywood 11y ago
well, scan a bit further, the 'replica' is the only one ever made! :) "... a design never built by Babbage that only existed in his plans and sketches"
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- theoh 11y ago
  Actually there are now two, due to Myhrvold.
masklinn 11y ago
> it's not THE Difference Engine Couldn't be, Babbage never finished it, switched to the Analytical Engine (burning his government funding bridges) and never finished that either. The subject of the article also isn't the original design, they're the No. 2 design following lessons learned working on the Analytical Engine. Of note: on top of the two Difference Engines, the Science Museum built the printer which Babbage had designed for the Engine. Babbage had realised that many table errors came from typesetting transcription errors, so the printer was designed to produce stereotype plates, templates for mass-printing with limited room for human error. Also contrary to what the article seems to say, Myhrvold didn't fund the first DE reconstruction. He commissioned one, and part of that commission was used to build the printer.
- CydeWeys 11y ago
  You seem to know about this, so, related question for you. Do you think it would have greatly changed history if Babbage had succeeded at creating these mechanical computers? Or were they a vestigial dead end, and simply spreading the knowledge and theory to make them was the real extent of their influence? I'm guessing the latter, but in no way am I sure.
  - jerf 11y ago
    I don't think the machine being unfinishable was an accident of history; I think that's an accurate reflection of the phenomenal expense to create one it would have been. Given that the current techniques were largely good enough, it would have been difficult to recover that value. We are incomprehensibly richer now than society was then, it was almost certainly a great deal easier for us to build 20 years ago than it would have been for Babbage, and it still took 17 years and a lot of "drama" even so. The cost/benefit ratio just hadn't quite gone positive, or at least, not positive enough, yet.
  - derekp7 11y ago
    Have you read the book "The Difference Engine" by Gibson and Sterling? (Kind of what kicked off the whole Steampunk genre). Basically a taste of modern society could have been realized many decades earlier. But the real bummer, is that Edison's lab essentially invented vacuum tubes, but shelved it as Edison didn't see any profit potential in it. Another missed opportunity for earlier computing.
    - CydeWeys 11y ago
      I did read the novel, but that's a work of fiction though whose primary purpose is to be enjoyable to read. I don't think it's particularly useful here.
  - masklinn 11y ago
    Most of the early electronic computers didn't change the world, they only prefigured the chances and mechanical computers I think wouldn't have been able to come through (you can't really make a mechanical home computer or smartphone). On the other hand, they would have provided computing power almost a century before electronic computers, who knows what roads could have been taken that weren't open to us with the power of human computers?

FrankyHollywood 11y ago

well, scan a bit further, the 'replica' is the only one ever made! :) "... a design never built by Babbage that only existed in his plans and sketches"

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
theoh 11y ago
Actually there are now two, due to Myhrvold.

masklinn 11y ago

> it's not THE Difference Engine Couldn't be, Babbage never finished it, switched to the Analytical Engine (burning his government funding bridges) and never finished that either. The subject of the article also isn't the original design, they're the No. 2 design following lessons learned working on the Analytical Engine. Of note: on top of the two Difference Engines, the Science Museum built the printer which Babbage had designed for the Engine. Babbage had realised that many table errors came from typesetting transcription errors, so the printer was designed to produce stereotype plates, templates for mass-printing with limited room for human error. Also contrary to what the article seems to say, Myhrvold didn't fund the first DE reconstruction. He commissioned one, and part of that commission was used to build the printer.

CydeWeys 11y ago
You seem to know about this, so, related question for you. Do you think it would have greatly changed history if Babbage had succeeded at creating these mechanical computers? Or were they a vestigial dead end, and simply spreading the knowledge and theory to make them was the real extent of their influence? I'm guessing the latter, but in no way am I sure.
- jerf 11y ago
  I don't think the machine being unfinishable was an accident of history; I think that's an accurate reflection of the phenomenal expense to create one it would have been. Given that the current techniques were largely good enough, it would have been difficult to recover that value. We are incomprehensibly richer now than society was then, it was almost certainly a great deal easier for us to build 20 years ago than it would have been for Babbage, and it still took 17 years and a lot of "drama" even so. The cost/benefit ratio just hadn't quite gone positive, or at least, not positive enough, yet.
- derekp7 11y ago
  Have you read the book "The Difference Engine" by Gibson and Sterling? (Kind of what kicked off the whole Steampunk genre). Basically a taste of modern society could have been realized many decades earlier. But the real bummer, is that Edison's lab essentially invented vacuum tubes, but shelved it as Edison didn't see any profit potential in it. Another missed opportunity for earlier computing.
  - CydeWeys 11y ago
    I did read the novel, but that's a work of fiction though whose primary purpose is to be enjoyable to read. I don't think it's particularly useful here.
- masklinn 11y ago
  Most of the early electronic computers didn't change the world, they only prefigured the chances and mechanical computers I think wouldn't have been able to come through (you can't really make a mechanical home computer or smartphone). On the other hand, they would have provided computing power almost a century before electronic computers, who knows what roads could have been taken that weren't open to us with the power of human computers?