WI Babbage's Difference Engine No 2 had been completed
- Thread starter The Dean
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Max Sinister
Banned
The first thing people'd use them for would be complicated calculations which have to be very exact. Logarithms and such. That's what computers can do best, so that'd come before office software and such. What kind of complicated calculations did they have?
There used to a website that had a whole timeline based around this premise. It was a little dodgy, in that it used a lot of butterflies. It went all the way to 2000, and postulated that the Analytical Engine would accelerate technological progress throughout the 19th century. Inventions such as airships, tanks, telephones, and others, appeared earlier than in OTL. Ironically, by 2000, there is little difference in tech from OTL, except that it is much more pervasive, because it had been around longer. Politically, the great powers of Europe and the U.S. are able to maintain their worldwide power base far beyond their natural lifespan due to the tech boost of the Engine.
Max Sinister
Banned
You're not talking about this website where Jim Carrey is knighted or ennobled by the monarch?
Did the engineers of that time do stress calculations? They would not need logarithms if they had a difference engine. Chemists and physicists in universities and industry would have been able to carry out their calculations far more rapidly as well.
They could actually have had a Difference engine on a large ship, this is a replica built in the London Science Museum in 1999.
This would have been an invaluable aid to navigation and it would not have been long before it was used to predict ranges and trajectories for Naval gunfire.
Bill Cameron
Banned
Dean,
No, they made it all up.
Oddly enough, using the Engine to calculate log tables was the main use Babbage had in mind. That might have been because he didn't foresee them becoming 'personal computers' when the device in question weighed hundreds of pounds, used bleeding edge machining capabilities in it's construction, and required sophisiticated maintenance.
Perhaps. I'd think there'd still be a lot of slipsticks in use, just as there was in the OTL up through the early 1970s when I was trained to use one is school. We should use the mainframe era; ~1955 to ~1970, for a guide. Businesses, industries, research facilities, and educational institutions would use the single Engines they own for statistical processing, inventory control, and other types of large scale number crunching. The processing time on an Engine would also be strictly controlled.
Occasionally the Engines would be used for 'Big Problems' just like the Crays are used now. As for 'Big Problems', we're looking for the 19th Century's version of protein folding, SETI signal processing, and the like.
Bill
Hi all. I was thinking that automation (particularly the assembly line) could be developed much earlier in ATL.
Hi Bill
I didn't know for sure, just wanted confirmation.
The replica the science museum made used 19th century tools, methods and engineering tolerances in it's construction. It has been found to be accurate, robust and reliable.
Once it was realised they had a reliable tool that could be replicated without any difficulty how long would it take for it to have a major impact on the world?
Deano
Dean,
No, they made it all up.
I didn't know for sure, just wanted confirmation.
The replica the science museum made used 19th century tools, methods and engineering tolerances in it's construction. It has been found to be accurate, robust and reliable.
Once it was realised they had a reliable tool that could be replicated without any difficulty how long would it take for it to have a major impact on the world?
Deano
Bill Cameron
Banned
Deano,
The 19th Century was 100 years long, so tools, methods, and eningeering tolerances from just which part of the 19th Century did the museum use? The advances in engineering, measurements, and machining between 1801 and 1900 were rather substantial.
Babbage first proposed the Engine in 1822, but no manufacturer could achieve the precision he required. Babbage was able to build a less capable model in 1847 but again the bleeding edge nature of the machines's manufacturing requirments hobbled his efforts. Take micrometers for example.
Those measurement tools, which are far more accurate than vernier calipers and - very importantly - far more repeatable, had been around since the late 1600s. However, the first commerically available micrometer and the first micrometer that scientists trusted wasn't developed until 1888. That's a wee bit after Babbage's time.
I still believe an examination of the 'mainframe era' in computing will answer most of your questions regarding the applications for such machines and the number of machines that may be used. Oddly enough, the programmable nature of these machines will limit the number of applications and users. Let me explain.
Up thread someone mentioned using Babbage engines as fire control devices. That would be a 'waste' of the machine's abilities. While a Babbage engine would be very useful in calculating ballistic tables for whichever gun is being tested, using a Babbage engine to control the aiming of a single gun or battey of guns would be a 'waste' of computing power. You can - and people in the OTL actually did - construct purpose-built, mechanical, fire control computers for that task. (Specially built computers were made ofr other tasks too, check out the US Census.)
These computers were 'programmed' by their physical construction and they could only handle a task or group of similar tasks. You couldn't aim a gun with such a computer one minute, then throw a few switches and run an inventory check the next. A Babbage engine would be used to calculate the ballistic tables for the RN's latest big gun, but the RN warship carrying that big gun wouldn't use a Babbage engine to aim it. Instead, it would use a purpose-built, 'one-program-only', fire control computer(1).
Because we have microchips, we can 'throw away' computing power. Your instant coffee maker has far more computing power than it absolutely needs, more than the LEM flew with in 1969. That's because chips are very small and very cheap. We use them more like a commodity and less like actual machines. Babbage engines wouldn't have had any of those attributes, so Babbage engines wouldn't be used like computer chips.
Bill
1 - Successful, working Babbage engines routinely producing useful results would spark the construction and use of more of these purpose-built, one-program-only machines. The engines show that mechanical computing works and is of obvious benefits, so 'stripped down' models permanently dedicated by their physical contruction to a single task or similiar tasks would be developed. Because they'd be less complicated and less difficult to make, they'd be cheaper and thus more widely used.
... obviously only to me...
Nah, it's interesting. I suspect he probably could have finished DE#2, but he couldn't have finished the Analytical Engine - it not only cost more money that he had, but the way he kept enhancing it and changing it and making it better, it would suck up any amount of money he threw at it and never be completed.
Babbage should have held off building the things and just refined them untill they could actually be built...
But then you wouldn't have the same username! Probably. And, therefore, Babbage shouldn't have changed his plans.
That's logic right there ^.
Anyway, yes, I suppose that refining the design first would have been better than continually changing it while constructing the thing. However, nobody was building anything like them (AFAIK), so how was he supposed to test the design if he didn't build them?
I suppose the later he starts to build them, the easier it will be to do give advancing materials tech.
If only Meccano had been around then:
In 1935 Meccano was the primary construction material used by J. B. Bratt in building several analog computers. The computers were used for several decades to calculate differential equations, and one such machine, the "Meccano Differential Analyser No. 2" survives to this day. That specific machine was used by the Allies in Operation Chastise where the computer played a critical role in planning the bombing runs for bombs that would bounce across water before colliding with and destroying German dams.[8] [9]
...
In 2002 and 2005 (respectively), Tim Robinson constructed working Meccano models of Charles Babbage's Difference Engines #1 and #2.
Dammit......
In 2002 and 2005 (respectively), Tim Robinson constructed working Meccano models of Charles Babbage's Difference Engines #1 and #2.
Gibson and Sterling "The Difference Engine"
Has no-one here read "The Difference Engine" by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling? POD is that Byron does not go abroad, but leads the Radicals in the 1830 General Election, and after a Tory coup and subsequent revolution, becomes PM as leader of the Industrial Radical Party. Babbage is generously funded (actually, he was pretty generously funded in OTL), and a steam-driven mechanical IT revolution follows.
Has no-one here read "The Difference Engine" by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling? POD is that Byron does not go abroad, but leads the Radicals in the 1830 General Election, and after a Tory coup and subsequent revolution, becomes PM as leader of the Industrial Radical Party. Babbage is generously funded (actually, he was pretty generously funded in OTL), and a steam-driven mechanical IT revolution follows.