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Hardware

Babbage Engine Printer Finally Available 89

Posted by timothy from the hope-yet-for-the-amiga dept.
MrCreosote writes: "This story from the BBC announces the availability of a printer for the Babbage Difference Engine. Originally designed to print the tables that were calculated by the difference engine, it includes advanced features such as user definable formatting and auto line wrap. It is widely believed that the lack of peripherals was a significant factor in the failure of the Difference Engine taking off and gaining a significant market share -- a situation that has led to the current Microsoft monopoly." Kudos to the folks at London's Science Museum who actually built this.
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Babbage Engine Printer Finally Available More

Babbage Engine Printer Finally Available

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  • Modem (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Now we only need a Morse code modem, and lines between several Difference Engines, and we could have an analog Internet...

    Of course, if this had caught on back then, after a few days somebody would come up with a way to transfer porn...

    Harald

  • difference engine warez ? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Anyone got any warez for the difference engine ? I already tried 0daywarez [slashdot.org] but not luck so far.

    w4r3zm4573r

  • Still waiting... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Still waiting for it to be compatible with my Jaquard Loom Punch cards? If I can't use my software on it, what good is it really?
  • Why do you think there are so many dungeons and shackles, and maces and racks and whips in England anyway? Brits invented S&M as we know it today!
  • The Romans had worked out the principles of the steam engine, as decribed in uncovered dicuments, but lacked the technology to build it. Just think, trains and cars and maybe even planes could've been invented 2000 years ago and Rome would still rule the world!

  • Why? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I mean, for it's time the Difference Engine was a highly advanced concept, but it's now the year 2000, not 1780, and we have these amazing things called computers. What is the point of building something which can't even compete with my pocket calculator? And then building a printer for it? Is it my imagination, or is this just a waste of taxpayer's money, money which would be better spent on important social services like health care?

  • Is anyone... (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 13, 2000 @12:42AM (#1136207)
    ...going to write a Linux driver for it?
  • Actually that's an ever better question, and a nice student project: write a Difference engine (or even Analytical Engine) simulator -- ideally with graphics showing the simulated machine in operation, but failing that, just simulating the abstract operations.

    IIRC, there is an analytical engine simulator floating around on the new. My gut says fourmilab.ch has it, but I don't have time to check, sorry.

  • Re:Big! (Score:1)

    by Dom2 ( 838 )
    Hey, have you seen a Fujitsu Line Printer? We have one at each of our branches, plus several at our head office and they weigh about 6 hundredweight each. Which is getting close to that 2.5 tonnes for the babbage printer... Unfortunately, Fujitsu don't appear to have them on their web site, as production was stopped several years ago.
  • > What would Democrit (first postulated the existence of atoms ins
    >ancient greece) say if he saw a scanning tunneling microscope in action?

    Ah, yes, Democretes (or whatever the correct phrase is). WIth the simple
    demand, "Show me your atoms Democretes," Aristotle set physics back
    a thousand years. Hmm, 200years/word, not bad :)

    And in the last civilization that had a fighting chance of doing
    the analytics for several hundred years (I'm guessing the next after
    Athens would be Arabs in the late first millenium), he set it
    back another 500 with his "natural rate of fall" instead of testing
    gravity.

    The biting irony of the whole thing is that in the introduction to
    his Physics, he states the need to test with experiment . . .

    hawk, a philsopher and physicist as well
  • Just think calculation cost measured in calculations per gallon.

  • Now, if only Babbage or one of his contemporaries had designed a telegraph modem of some sort, the prospect of a Victorian Internet would be raised.
  • Look at the man in white in the photos.
    He is Q from the 007 series. In "The World is not Enough", he retired. And this is what he's doing with his engineering ability!
    __
  • According to the works of Llewelyn, Desmond Llewelyn [imdb.com], you only live twice [imdb.com], so I resist believing that Q is dead, instead of merely hiding at the Science Museum.
    __
  • Yep. I just think it's a shame that 19th century engineering wasn't up to the manufacture of these things - think what would have followed.

    I fancy wasnering down to our micro (and nano) engineering dept. here at Birmingham Uni (UK) and seeing if they could make a nano-sized version. Portable difference engines :) Ok, I know it'd only run for a few seconds before siezing (lubricant molecules are of the same order as some component dinemsions) but it'd still be cool.

    There's always that book "The Difference Engine" by Gibson and Sterling - very good and thought provoking account of how things could have turned out.

    Troc
  • From what I remember, they built one of his simpler models, proving the concept but didn't have the technical expertise to produce the full difference engine (I think they byult the analytical engine or something). They couldn't manufacture enough parts consistently - there was also a problem with expense, the experts were very expensive, as were the raw materials.

    Troc
  • Yep. You can find it from http://www.fourmilab.ch by dearching for "analytical". Thanks.
  • I can't be the only /.er who remembers programs that printed Snoopy Calendars on text-only line printers by exploiting over-printing and the different densities of the various characters.

    So, it is a real question: could one find settings for the Difference engine + printer that would print a Snoopy Calendar? or any recognisable image?

    Is there a simulator available?

    Actually that's an ever better question, and a nice student project: write a Difference engine (or even Analytical Engine) simulator -- ideally with graphics showing the simulated machine in operation, but failing that, just simulating the abstract operations.

    Steve Linton
  • I'd heard this too. It seems Babbage could have done it if he'd had the money and perhaps the Project Management skills. It wasn't an absolute problem with materials or machine tools.
  • I fancy wasnering down to our micro (and nano) engineering dept. here at Birmingham Uni (UK) and seeing if they could make a nano-sized version. Portable difference engines :) Ok, I know it'd only run for a few seconds before siezing (lubricant molecules are of the same order as some component dinemsions) but it'd still be cool.
    Drexler's "Engines of Creation" (the seminal nanotech book) included some basic feasibility computations for nano-mechanical computers. They were binary not decimal, and based mainly on sliding rods rather than cogs, but the idea is there. Lubrication is not really the right way to think at those scales -- you simply have to make sure that none of the atoms on component A is going to bond to any atoms on component B in a way that you don't want. Fluorinating all the spare bonds at the surfaces works well.
  • ...cuz we all want to replay that flameware :-)

    --
  • Well.. now somebody has an excuse to port linux to it... =)

  • Imagine... (Score:3)

    by korpiq ( 8532 ) <-,&korpiq,iki,fi> on Thursday April 13, 2000 @02:11AM (#1136223) Homepage
    A beowulf of these!

    (sorry! I had to!)

    More seriously, wouldn't it be more interesting to have a CAD/software model of the system. By trying it out in a simulation, generations to come might learn a trick or two about engineering, thus, thinking better.

    A joyous effort however.
  • I remember one of my first printers... the old Gorilla Bannana, which was an 8 wire dot matrix printer where each wire was actually that... a wire, that went out into a seperate magnetic coil. They were all seperated by a quarter inch or so, and you could watch them move while it worked.

    Slow, noisy, and primitive looking... it was probably less advanced then the unit Babbage designed hundreds of years before...

    Though it did have a parallel port :)

  • The Register [theregister.co.uk], a British tech news site, had this to say on the 2.5 ton device:

    "New device not ideal for mobile use..."
  • And a german geek would say, Zuse's Z1-Z3 were the first computers. They were 1/2 mechanical and 1/2 electric, AFAIK.
    I read his book, how they build the machine(s). I can say only one thing: They had the true hacker spirit!

  • Blimey... (Score:5)

    by Tim C ( 15259 ) on Thursday April 13, 2000 @01:37AM (#1136227)
    A computer printer that was originally designed more than 150 years ago has finally been built and will go on display at the Science Museum in London, UK.

    And I thought getting hardware support for Linux took a long time!

    (Sorry, couldn't resist it :) )

    Cheers,

    Tim
  • Last time I heard anything about this Difference Engine project, I seem to remember that, although the parts were manufactured using modern techniques, they were only made to the tolerances possible in Babbage's day. Anybody know anything about this?
    --
  • ... if I can buy a fully working miniature version from the gift shop.

    And where's the source, I mean blueprints :)
  • I don't know much about US museums, but when I was wandering around Europe I discovered the Deutch-Museum (spelling?) in Munich, Germany.

    That place is a geek wonderland. I wandered around for two happy days, looking at the underwater phone cables, steam engines, old computers, really old mechanical computing devices, the big model railroad, the submarine(!), the interactive chemistry experiments. And they have live demonstrations of bigger experiments, one of which is a demonstration of artificial lightning. Indoors! BOOM! (and the little model of the house catches fire... Whee!)

    Check it out if you are ever in Munich.


    Torrey Hoffman (Azog)

  • Well... He should've read Cogs Complete then, shouldn't he?

    Silly Babbage. ;)
  • Why write "Hello world" in every language?

    --

  • Oh come on, people (Score:3)

    by ChrisGoodwin ( 24375 ) on Thursday April 13, 2000 @02:08AM (#1136233) Journal
    The Babbage Engine is dead, all right? Can't you people just give it up? Face it, there's no hope for the Babbage Engine ever coming back.

    C'mon. Grow up and get a real computer.
    --
  • Yeah, but when is the Babbage Engine finally going to get some decent ACL-based security? And where can I find a virus scanner for it?

    And the 3D acceleration sucks. How am I suppose to play Quake on this thing?
    --

  • I hope I'm not alone at being awestruck at what this man accomplished so long ago. It's rare in the present that something is envisioned so far ahead of it's time that it takes decades to let manufacturing technologies to catch up with IT instead of developing uses for an already made product.
    Babbage did some pretty cool stuff. But, I read in a magazine (Science and Technology, IIRC) that the main reason Babbage couldn't get his engine built was because he was a pretty arrogant guy and tended to piss off potential investors.

    I seem to recal an effort to build the engine using only tools of the time. Again, IIRC, it was built and it worked.

    --
  • The Babbage Engine has always been superior, and only died because of mismanagement at Commodore, Escom, and Gateway. It's still not dead and can do things that today's PC's...

    Oh, sorry, I was confusing it with another dead computer.

  • The article says that Babbage purposely inserted errors to foil competitors. And here we were, thinking all the bugs in MickySoft products were because the marketing team rushed beta products out the door.

  • "Difference Engine" I think
  • Who remembers Little Polly Nomial?
  • Oh yes and (4) -- its a great hack.

  • Because... (Score:5)

    by hey! ( 33014 ) on Thursday April 13, 2000 @03:38AM (#1136241) Homepage Journal
    it is worthwhile to understand the past.

    When an anthropologist makes a flint knife, is he wasting his time because he can by a far superior pocket knife for a couple of bucks?

    Are paleontologists wasting their time trying to understand dinosaurs because they are extinct?

    There are three good reasons I can immediately see to build something like this.

    (1) It helps us get a better appreciation exactly what our ancestors were capable of doing.
    A lot of people have crackpot economic and social theories that flourish in ignorance of history. We have a tendency to think that the way things turned out was inevitable; it is important to question these assumptions. What had happened if Babbage had more time and resources? Things could have been very different

    (2) It has educational value -- it can teach students about mechanics and mathematics.

    (3) It is important for designers to understand the basic principles of computational machines, and no better way to understand basic principles than looking at real examples early primitive machines. Sure you can plug together boards and create a powerful computer, but what about people in the future who will create entirely new computational technologies such as mechanical nanocomputers? These people will need to have a database of basic designs.

    Who knows, maybe someday we'll have the quantum equivalent of mercury delay tubes in some future computer. Part of the charm of computer science is that in many ways there is nothing new under the sun.
  • Desmond Llewelyn [universalexports.net], that is.

    But here's his picture [umich.edu].

    timothy
  • Very true! I remember this fact being referenced in an article on the machine in a copy of SciAm a few years ago. Your memory is correct.
  • You aren't the only who has had this thought.

    I tend to think that many (esp. the ones from the 19th century) would be intensely interested - perhaps going so far as (once they understood the tech) making suggestions for improvements. I have an image of one of these geniuses standing proud, with a twinkle in his eye, seeing his work, well, working!

    Doubtless, some would cry - but not like a breakdown, but more like a single tear - the joy of knowing that what he (or she!) did and learned was not in vain...
  • For the book that Doron Swade wrote, "The Cogwheel Brain"? Specifically, I am looking for a US or UK distributor, hopefully one which will take internet orders. Amazon (bah! - I want the book bad, though!) didn't have it, neither did fatbrain. I found one distributor in .au, but shipping looked like it might have been expensive (for those that want to know, the distributor is www.mindbodyspirit.com.au).

    Does anybody know the ISBN of the book, or publisher info - maybe I could get a bookstore to order it for me...
  • ... to use a time machine and show Babbage this. Even if its too late, he at least has the satifaction to know that he was right.
  • actually, "i would have put down the correct answer, ma'am, but doing so would violate a non-disclosure agreement i signed with your competitor's company" is not too uncommon.
  • The only way this could possibly scan (or rhyme) is if you mispronounced vi to rhyme with "rye".
    --
    "HORSE."
  • I didn't catch that, but we did get Sir Dystic from the Cult of the Dead Cow on Radio 4's Today program this morning, which I thought was quite significant in its own way...
    Anyway, can you make it play "Daisy"?
  • Write it yourself! You lazy Open Source bastard!
  • Yeah, I meant her. It isn't every day that a story about my slash-namesake comes up, so I had to play it up somehow. Heh...

    Friends and I were actually discussing this recently. My understanding is that Babbage was able to build the Difference Engine (DE), but not the Analytical Engine (AE). The Science Museum in London has now replicated part of the DE, but the AE has never been built by anyone and there is some question of whether it could be built at all. The AE was an order of magnitude more complex than the DE, and some of the gears would be under so much stress that even modern materials couldn't handle it, nevermind the brass that Babbage would have used.

    Does anyone know anything more about this? I find it interesting that no one has tried to implement Babbage's machines, with the partial exception of this exhibit now. Everyone in the computer industry (and elsewhere of course) owes quite a bit to those original designs, but no one has ever really tried them out to see if they would work, with the exception of components of the smaller machine now.

    I think it would be interesting to see what a functional AE would have been capable of doing. It may be nothing remarkable by modern standards, but as a historical example I think it would be priceless. This industry has earned a whole lot of money for a whole lot of people; surely some group of people out there could afford to finance a project like the construction of an AE. And who knows -- maybe some slashdotter could get Linux running on it for publicity... hahaha



  • Do you have any idea how long I've been waiting for this? Oh, sure, I come up with this whole computer idea you lot are so enamoured with, and a whole industry springs up around it with all these little gadgets and knick-knacks, and yet it takes over a century for anyone to get me a printer? Pah!

    Don't do me any favors kids, I'll just build it myself out of this coffin. Ingrates!

    Somebody get me Ada, we've got work to do...



  • Re:Victorian Fax machines (Score:3)

    by sMiles ( 61225 ) on Thursday April 13, 2000 @06:26AM (#1136253)
    The French had an image-capable fax system running over telegraph lines in *1869* - using synchronised pendulums kept in time with tacho pulses. The input end was a contact point moving over an embossed foil or similar to give a pulsed current representing the image or text. Each tacho pulse represented one raster line, and the printing was direct, using electrochromic ink to respond to the incoming pulses. I think it operated over ~20 km at least.
    There was a reference to this in New Scientist about 5 years ago.
    Not bad, 20 years ahead of the telephone!
  • Hm, am I simply humor-, sarcasm- or irony-impared, or is there some problem with the department-string for this article? I just don't get it... :(
  • A. Bragging Rights...
    B. Attention (they got it worldwide)
    C. Why not?


  • It never ceases to amaze me... (Score:3)

    by The Conkman ( 78923 ) on Thursday April 13, 2000 @12:59AM (#1136256) Homepage
    I hope I'm not alone at being awestruck at what this man accomplished so long ago. It's rare in the present that something is envisioned so far ahead of it's time that it takes decades to let manufacturing technologies to catch up with IT instead of developing uses for an already made product. Also, he designed the device without a working prototype yet it works flawlessly IRL. I know if I were to design something that grandiose on paper, it wouldn't work at all :^) All I can say is "I'm not worthy" :^)

  • Analytical Engine Emulator (Score:4)

    by Cplus ( 79286 ) on Thursday April 13, 2000 @03:35AM (#1136257) Homepage Journal
    Here's [fourmilab.ch] a page full of links and info on not only Babbage and his engine but also emulation of his Analytical Engine. There are also links to download the source for the mathematical function library and the java.

  • And where's the source, I mean blueprints

    Don't know about the printer, but then all the Babbage papers can be purchased here [nmsi.ac.uk].

    Sorry, not free as in "no money", but I guess the copyright will have expired now so free in that sense?

    It's a neat hack :-)


  • ... to use a time machine and show Babbage this. Even if its too late, he at least has the satifaction to know that he was right.

    I sometimes have thoughts like this...

    what would it be like to bring back from beyond all the scientists and geniuses who died poor and forgotten (or sometimes well respected, but not for their inventions...) and show them the current realisation of their works?

    What would Babbage think about modern computers? How would Leonardo da Vinci like a helicopter ride? What would Democrit (first postulated the existence of atoms in ancient greece) say if he saw a scanning tunneling microscope in action? How would Newton like a copy of a physics book for undergraduate students, which contains tenfold more knowledge than all the physicists of the world had in his time? What would the legions of forgotten geniuses who first thought of machines we only realized in the last century think of them?

    Would they run in fright from the abominable horrors they see, would they spill tears of joy or would they complain about us not getting it exactly right and everything was better at their time, you know!

  • What had happened if Babbage had more time and resources? Things could have been very different!

    IIRC there is a science fiction story about an alternate reality in which Babbage successfully finished and sold his machines. This lead to an early advancement of computers based on 19th century technologies - like steam driven computers networked with pneumatic delivery tubes and such. Think of it as Jules Verne gone informatics :)

    Unfortunately I only read a review of the story and forgot the name - does anyone know it?

  • aargh... how could I forget this? I definitely didn't read enough science fiction lately...:-)

  • So is there a difference engine emulator available for Linux?

    And I think we should give Babbage honorary First Post for this article.
  • And those arrogant slashdotters who argue for shorter patent life spans...
  • At least it could withstand an EMP shockwave.
    But then again, bugs might litereally have eaten away at the programming.

    Dom.
  • I found GNAT (the GNU Ada compiler) on Google.

    Um, i think he means Ada Lovelace. Ada the language is named after her, btw. Unless that was meant in humour and i missed it :)

  • It "crashed" last night (Score:3)

    by eellis ( 112890 ) on Thursday April 13, 2000 @01:05AM (#1136267)
    As i was listening to BBC radio on the way to work this morning, they had an interview with the team who built the printer.

    Apparently, it "crashed" last night, and they'd been up all night trying to unjam the mechanism (the equivalent of rebooting!) Plus ca change.

  • Could you give me a hint, and then just beat the hell out of me?

  • I mean, for it's time the Difference Engine was a highly advanced concept, but it's now the year 2000, not 1780

    I hate to be pedantic (OK, well, I love it) but Babbage was more like 1830, not 1780.

  • The London Science Museum is pretty kick ass as far as Museums go. They have a huge section devoted to old computers. Although more European Centric (or perhaps non-US centric) it covers some of the non-US computers that pre-date Univac.

    I can only think of a couple science museums in the states that are on par with the quality and the size of the London Science Museum.

  • My favorite reference in that book was somebody bringing 'shrooms to Thomas Huxley. It probably helped that I had just read 'The Doors of Perception' by Aldous Huxley and was discussing Tom in my Evolution class.
  • Nathan Myrvold, the former head of Microsoft R&D, paid for this project. He's supposed to get a Difference Engine and printer for his house out of the deal. Really.

  • Somebody get me Ada, we've got work to do...

    I found GNAT [adahome.com] (the GNU Ada compiler) on Google.

    Kill Unisys [burnallgifs.org] and all the rest of the software patenters. [mit.edu]
  • It's the fact that if you ask an American geek what the first real computer is, he'll say the ENIAC. If you ask a British geek, he'll say the Babbage Diff Eng. Wait, a computer made of gears and cams? That's like saying that the first automobile was the horse drawn buggy!
  • In a Scientific American article on the DE a few years ago, it was noted that one cog template in particular had bits that stuck out in the wrong direction, and only by trying to build the machine could you notice that it was wrong.
  • That was nasty! :)
  • A friend of mine put "I could tell you but then I'd have to kill you" as an answer to a maths question. The University really didn't like that.
  • I just think it's a shame that 19th century engineering wasn't up to the manufacture of these things

    Didn't they use the same precision that was available at the time to prove it could have been done?
  • Pfah! You and your PC's! The difference engine was doing what the modern PC does years ago (take up a lot of space for no major benefit). If you want a real computer then use a giant stone circle.
  • Rather than a lesson in the power and value of Open Source, would it not be a lesson in the weakness and worthlessness of Open Source? I mean, more than a century after the original author got dead...
  • I now have a use for that steam-powered mouse that I have been saving, just in case I needed it.
  • I like that they said the errors were most likely "deliberate errors to avoid industrial espionage." Perhaps I could try the same approach with my exams. "I would have put down the correct answer, sir, but doing so would have compromised national security."
  • Asketh the poster:
    Is it my imagination, or is this just a waste of taxpayer's money, money which would be better spent on important social services like health care?
    It's just your imagination. :)

    This is done almost solely because it is cool. It's a neat, oddball thing that doens't quite fit into a narrow, compartmentalized network of higher priorities. It's done because, for whatever reason, it lifts the souls of many who hear of it. It's done because it vindicates the avant-garde geek Babbage. It's done ... well, it's done because it's fun, and the world needs more fun.

    What's the point of perfect health care if life is no longer worth living?

  • The business world is still waiting for service pack 1 before buying one.

  • Big! (Score:2)

    by suss ( 158993 )
    Damn! And i thought my HP Laserjet IIISi was big... imagine trying to get that into your house!
  • I recently purchased a Meccano set which included the blueprints for the Analytical Engine version 4, which I built and it works fine but it would be nice to have a printer to go with it. Do I need to upgrade to Lubricating Oil Pack 3 to be able to use it?
  • Who else would like to see a mindstorms version of this? Lets see... a difference engine, and a way to program it via your PC. If you could somehow transfer your program to something that was entirely mechanical, that would be cool!

  • Several versions were built. The interesting thing is why he wanted to do this. Horse Races! He and his investors were going to make money betting the ponies.

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