What If Babbage Had Succeeded? 212
mikejuk writes "It was on this day 220 years ago (December 26 1791) that Charles Babbage was born. The calculating machines he invented in the 19th century, although never fully realized in his lifetime, are rightly seen as the forerunners of modern programmable computers. What if he had succeeded? Babbage already had plans for game arcades, chess playing machines, sound generators and desktop publishing. A Victorian computer revolution was entirely possible."
Re:Of course it was possible (Score:2, Insightful)
The question was more, "What would the world have been like had he succeeded, then and centuries later". Or did you skip most of it to get a first post?
Not possible. (Score:3, Insightful)
A Victorian computer revolution was not possible, as should be obvious to anyone who understands how computers work. Just think of how massive (and weak) computers were back in the days of vacuum tubes. Now imagine how massive, weak, and prone to break downs they'd be if they were made of clockwork. You'd have an entire warehouse filled with moving parts that might be equivalent to a digital watch... at least until one of the gears breaks. The technology simply didn't exist to make computing feasible.
Re:We'd be all programming in Ada right now (Score:4, Insightful)
Jus being able to refine ballistic tables could have made WWI much more lethal. It mightmade longer-ranged artillery practical, and of course better weapons get used more.
Re:"what if" game (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes and no. Mechanical computers do not have the scalability of electronic computers, to be sure, so that line of development would have reached its end.
At the same time, having a Turing complete computer, even a mechanical one, in the first half of the 19th century would have given mathematicians and engineers a whole new grammar to begin working on, much as even the relatively primitive digital computers of the 1940s to 1960s spurred on an absolutely astonishing amount of R&D, some of it still bearing fruit today.
I expect that if the Babbage machines had been built and had been put to use, they would have spurred the digital revolution nearly a century earlier, concentrating huge amounts of R&D by the Great Powers in the post-Napoleonic era. The military value, for instance, of fast and accurate cannon/mortar trajectory calculations would have given whoever developed such machines a considerable edge. The late 19th-early 20th century arms race was transformative in many ways, and the successors of Babbage's machines would have been caught up in that.
Re:Of course it was possible (Score:4, Insightful)
Given the current state of things in the US I'm not entirely sure that deserves to be in the past tense.
Re:Of course it was possible (Score:2, Insightful)
"I am an atheist and I hate fucking atheists so much. This idea is completely ludicrous and clearly you're just some weirdo who loves blaming bad things on religion. Possibly as a child you were forced to go to Sunday School when you wanted to play video games and now this is your infantile way of striking back."
What a bunch of prefaced bullshit, as the saying goes, "The important thing is you've found a way to feel superior to both". Congratulations!
Re:Of course it was possible (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd have to disagree, although the development of computing would have certainly taken a more "leisurely" pace than what it did in the late 20th Century.
What would have happened is that computers would have been seen as these big boxes or even completely separate buildings and have been used mostly for large organizations and governments. Keep in mind that most "Information Technology" departments owe at least some of their heritage to the "high priesthood of computer technicians" where only a select few were granted access to the computers.
I'm old enough to have been alive when programmers didn't even have a terminal on their desktop. Instead they have reams of paper that they carefully wrote software character by character with a pencil and then handed out sheets of code to transcriptionists who converted those sheets of paper into punch cards.... where you might be lucky to get the results of your software test in about a day or two unless your software was a high priority project. "The computer" was a place you could visit and go inside.
The question is how long that era of computer technology would have lasted. If Babbage had succeeded in getting funding from the British government in the 19th Century to complete his devices, their utility certainly would have been obvious and many of the suggestions made in this article would have occurred. Hinted at by the author would be the driving need to develop material science much earlier than actually happened, especially with the need to develop strong and lightweight materials in an attempt to miniaturize the devices. That would have in turn impacted the British military in some rather profound ways that might have pushed them into advancing in a great many other areas of scientific research.
For instance, how would World War One (not Two) have turned out differently with artillery that had the deadly accuracy that ended up being used in the Gulf War of 1990? Would Rudolf Diesel have developed a more efficient engine having those metal parts designed for computing available for internal combustion? How much earlier would aviation had developed with lightweight metals?
It is very hard to say what would have happened. Communications would have been slower (was slower) in the 19th Century, and that would have in turn slowed the development of computing compared to what we have today... but given a hundred year head start it certainly would have impacted more than just computing.
BTW, the integrated circuit didn't become used on a widespread basis until about 1970 or so. One of the very first significant applications of the technology was the Apollo Guidance Computers used for the lunar exploration program, where NASA ended up purchasing a substantial high two-digit percentage fraction of the total world-wide production (and one of the early sources of seed money for developing the semi-conductor industry). Most of the computers built in the 1960's used either vacuum tubes or discrete transistors when they were "improved versions". It is hard to say that computing technology hit a plateau until 1970.