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Another question you might ask is why wasn't the computer invented earlier? Babbage and Lovelace came close but they didn't realize they had (almost) invented
by ThomPete 4y ago
Another question you might ask is why wasn't the computer invented earlier?
Babbage and Lovelace came close but they didn't realize they had (almost) invented a computer they just thought they had invented a calculator. They thought they solved a math problem when in fact they had solved a physics problem.
We could have been traveling between stars by now.
- rgmerk 4y agoBut how useful would a mechanical general-purpose digital computer have been? Even if a competent project manager had been in charge, steam-driven mechanical computers would have been extremely expensive, physically large, and very slow. Most of the time, I’d expect special-purpose devices would have been more cost-effective. The technologies to build electronic computers didn’t exist for another half-century at least.
- ThomPete 4y agoGood questions because you are right, there is path dependency, but I do think a lot would have been different if we had understood earlier that computation is about physics not math.