Charles Babbage

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The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise by Nathan L. Ensmenger

barriers to entry, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, deskilling, Donald Knuth, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, functional programming, future of work, Grace Hopper, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, loose coupling, machine readable, new economy, no silver bullet, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, RAND corporation, Robert Gordon, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, sorting algorithm, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K

Swearingen Papers, 1936–1993,” Box 1, Folder 3, Archives of the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 86. Charles Babbage Institute Archives, box 88, folder 18, file 28. 87. “Correspondence re: Improper Use of CDP Initials,” (1966), CBI 88, “Data Processing Management Association records,” Box 18, Folder 22, Archives of the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 88. “Correspondence re: Academic and Experience Req’s,” (1966), CBI 88, “Data Processing Management Association records,” Box 18, Folder 22, Archives of the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 89.

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(1974), CBI 23, “George Glaser Papers, 1960–1989,” Box 1, Folder 3, Archives of the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. “Six Measures of Professionalism,” (1962), CBI 88, “Data Processing Management Association records,” Box 21, Folder 40, Archives of the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 47. “Local Chapter CDP Publicity,” (1964), CBI 46, “John K. Swearingen Papers, 1936–1993,” Box 1, Folder 17, Archives of the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 48. “Letter Re: Four Year Degree Requirement,” (1970), CBI 116, “Institute for Certification of Computer Professionals Records, 1960–1993,” Box 1, Folder 27, Archives of the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; R.

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“Letter Re: Four Year Degree Requirement,” (1970), CBI 116, “Institute for Certification of Computer Professionals Records, 1960–1993,” Box 1, Folder 27, Archives of the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; R. Higgins, “Letter to the DPMA” (1973) CBI 46, “John K. Swearingen Papers, 1936–1993,” Box 1, Folder 17, Archives of the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 49. J. D. Madden, “Letter to Calvin Elliot,” (June 27, 1967), CBI 88, “Data Processing Management Association records,” Box 22, Folder 1, Archives of the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 50. “Notes on ACM/DPMA merger” (1964), CBI 88, “Data Processing Management Association records,” Box 22, Folder 2, Archives of the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; “Correspondence re: ACM/DPMA liason,” (1966), CBI 88, “Data Processing Management Association records,” Box 22, Folder 1, Archives of the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; “Discussion of DPMA/ACM Merger,” (1970), CBI 88, “Data Processing Management Association records,” Box 22, Folder 3, Archives of the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 51.

Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks (Cambridge Studies in the Emergence of Global Enterprise) by Andrew L. Russell

Aaron Swartz, American ideology, animal electricity, barriers to entry, borderless world, Californian Ideology, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, creative destruction, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, open economy, OSI model, packet switching, pre–internet, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, vertical integration, web of trust, work culture

Two out of three from Tokyo abstained, with one in favor; the BBN vote split evenly, with two in favor and two against. 76 Cerf, INWG 102; “Result of Vote on End-to-End Protocol,” March 1976, INWG 109. 77 McKenzie, “INWG and the Conception of the Internet,” 70; Derek Barber, “INWG Affairs,” March 1976, INWG 111, McKenzie Collection; Louis Pouzin, “TC 6 Contributions to ISO,” June 15, 1976, INWG 122, McKenzie Collection; Pelkey, “Entrepreneurial Capitalism and Innovation,” chapter 6. 78 Vinton Cerf, oral history interview by Judy O’Neill, April 24, 1990, Reston, Virginia. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 79 Cerf interview, Charles Babbage Institute, 1990. 80 Cerf interview, Charles Babbage Institute, 1990. 81 Vint Cerf, “Report on TC-6 Meeting in Sao Paulo, October 1975,” December 1, 1975, INWG 103, McKenzie Collection; Louis Pouzin, “Chairmanship of WG 6.1,” March 16, 1976, INWG 110, McKenzie Collection. 82 Michel Gien, oral history interview by Andrew L. Russell, April 3, 2012, Paris, France. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; McKenzie, “INWG and the Conception of the Internet,” 70. 83 Pouzin, INWG 106. 84 Pouzin, “The Network Business – Monopolies and Entrepreneurs.” 85 Dépres interview, Charles Babbage Institute; John Day, interview with James Pelkey, July 11, 1988, Canton, Massachusetts, courtesy of James Pelkey; Najah Naffah, oral history interview by Andrew L.

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Oral history interview by Judy E. O’Neill, March 5, 1990, Menlo Park, California. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Cerf, Vinton. Oral history interview by Judy E. O’Neill, April 24, 1990, Reston, Virginia. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Crocker, Steve. Oral history interview by Judy E. O’Neill, October 24, 1991, Glenwood, Maryland. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Danthine, Andre. Oral history interview by Andrew L. Russell, April 6, 2012, Liege, Belgium. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Day, John.

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Oral history interview by Valérie Schafer, May 16, 2012, Paris, France. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Gien, Michel. Oral history interview by Andrew L. Russell, April 3, 2012, Paris, France. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Grangé, Jean-Louis. Oral history interview by Andrew L. Russell, April 3, 2012, Paris, France. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Kahn, Robert. Oral history interview by Judy E. O’Neill, April 24, 1990, Reston, Virginia. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Le Lann, Gérard.

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, bank run, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, citation needed, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Honoré de Balzac, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Louis Daguerre, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microbiome, Milgram experiment, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, PageRank, pattern recognition, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pre–internet, quantum cryptography, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Simon Singh, Socratic dialogue, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, talking drums, the High Line, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, Turing machine, Turing test, women in the workforce, yottabyte

♦ “ONE OF THE MOST FASCINATING OF ARTS”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 235. ♦ “EVERY SHOWER THAT FALLS”: “On the Age of Strata, as Inferred from the Rings of Trees Embedded in Them,” from Charles Babbage, The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise: A Fragment (London: John Murray, 1837), in Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 368. ♦ “ADMITTING IT TO BE POSSIBLE BETWEEN LONDON AND LIVERPOOL”: Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery, 10. ♦ “ENCLOSED IN SMALL CYLINDERS ALONG WIRES”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 447. ♦ “A COACH AND APPARATUS”: Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery, 273

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♦ “BY THE APPARENT IMPOSSIBILITY OF ARRANGING SIGNS”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 25. ♦ “THE DOT-AGE OF THE UNIVERSITY”: Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 25. ♦ “WE HAVE NOW TO RE-IMPORT THE EXOTIC”: Charles Babbage, Memoirs of the Analytical Society, preface (1813), in Anthony Hyman, ed., Science and Reform: Selected Works of Charles Babbage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 15–16. ♦ “THE BROWS OF MANY A CAMBRIDGE MODERATOR”: Agnes M. Clerke, The Herschels and Modern Astronomy (New York: Macmillan, 1895), 144. ♦ “EVERY MEMBER SHALL COMMUNICATE HIS ADDRESS”: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 34

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♦ “IT IS WITH NO INCONSIDERABLE DEGREE OF RELUCTANCE”: David Brewster to Charles Babbage, 3 July 1821, quoted in J. M. Dubbey, The Mathematical Work of Charles Babbage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 94. ♦ “LOGARITHMIC TABLES AS CHEAP AS POTATOES”: Babbage to John Herschel, 27 June 1823, quoted in Anthony Hyman, Charles Babbage, 53. ♦ “PROPOSITION TO REDUCE ARITHMETIC TO THE DOMINION OF MECHANISM”: Dionysius Lardner, “Babbage’s Calculating Engines,” 264. ♦ “THE QUESTION IS SET TO THE INSTRUMENT”: “Address of Presenting the Gold Medal of the Astronomical Society to Charles Babbage,” in Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines, 219

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, c2.com, call centre, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, commons-based peer production, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, desegregation, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gary Kildall, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, linear model of innovation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, PageRank, Paul Terrell, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yochai Benkler

All quotes from Menabrea and Lovelace’s notes are from Menabrea, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine.” 38. Charles Babbage to Ada, 1843, in Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, 197. 39. Spoken in the film Ada Byron Lovelace: To Dream Tomorrow, directed and produced by John Füegi and Jo Francis (Flare Productions, 2003); also, Füegi and Francis, “Lovelace & Babbage.” 40. Ada to Charles Babbage, July 5, 1843. 41. Ada to Charles Babbage, July 2, 1843. 42. Ada to Charles Babbage, Aug. 6, 1843; Woolley, The Bride of Science, 278; Stein, Ada, 114. 43. Ada to Lady Byron, Aug. 8, 1843. 44. Ada to Charles Babbage, Aug. 14, 1843. 45. Ada to Charles Babbage, Aug. 14, 1843. 46. Ada to Charles Babbage, Aug. 14, 1843. 47.

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Catherine Turney, Byron’s Daughter: A Biography of Elizabeth Medora Leigh (Readers Union, 1975), 160. 21. Velma Huskey and Harry Huskey, “Lady Lovelace and Charles Babbage,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Oct.–Dec. 1980. 22. Ada to Charles Babbage, Nov. 1839. 23. Ada to Charles Babbage, July 30, 1843. 24. Ada to Lady Byron, Jan. 11, 1841. 25. Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, 136. 26. Ada to Lady Byron, Feb. 6, 1841; Stein, Ada, 87. 27. Stein, Ada, 38. 28. Harry Wilmot Buxton and Anthony Hyman, Memoir of the Life and Labours of the Late Charles Babbage (ca. 1872; reprinted by Charles Babbage Institute/MIT Press, 1988), 46. 29. Martin Campbell Kelly and William Aspray, Computer: A History of the Information Machine (Westview, 2009), 6. 30.

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Swade, The Difference Engine, 42; Bernstein, The Analytical Engine, 46 and passim. 31. James Essinger, Jacquard’s Web (Oxford, 2004), 23. 32. Ada to Charles Babbage, Feb. 16, 1840. 33. Ada to Charles Babbage, Jan. 12, 1841. 34. Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (Longman Green, 1864), 136. 35. Luigi Menabrea, with notes upon the memoir by the translator, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine, Invented by Charles Babbage,” Oct. 1842, http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html. 36. Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, 136; John Füegi and Jo Francis, “Lovelace & Babbage and the Creation of the 1843 ‘Notes,’ ” Annals of the History of Computing, Oct. 2003. 37.

Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet by Katie Hafner, Matthew Lyon

air freight, Bill Duvall, Charles Babbage, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, conceptual framework, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, fault tolerance, Hush-A-Phone, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, natural language processing, OSI model, packet switching, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, speech recognition, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, The Soul of a New Machine

Newtonville, Mass., 3 March 1972. Kahn, Robert. Interview by Judy O’Neill. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 24 April 1990. Kahn, Robert. Interview by William Aspray. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 22 March 1989. Kleinrock, Leonard. Interview by Judy O’Neill. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 3 April 1990.

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Paper presented at the Spring Joint Computer Conference of the American Federation of Information Processing Societies, 1970. Roberts, Lawrence G. Interview by Arthur Norberg. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 4 April 1989. Ruina, Jack. Interview by William Aspray. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 20 April 1989. Sutherland, Ivan. Interview by William Aspray. Charles Babbage Institute DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 1 May 1989.

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Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California, January 1978. Cerf,Vinton G. Interview by Judy O’Neill. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/ IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 24 April 1990. Cerf,Vinton G., and Robert Kahn. “HOST and PROCESS Level Protocols for Internetwork Communication.” Notes of the International Network Working Group 39, 13 September 1973. Clark, Wesley. Interview by Judy O’Neill. Charles Babbage Institute, DARPA/IPTO Oral History Collection, University of Minnesota Center for the History of Information Processing, Minneapolis, Minn., 3 May 1990.

Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martin Campbell-Kelly, William Aspray, Nathan L. Ensmenger, Jeffrey R. Yost

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, Byte Shop, card file, cashless society, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, deskilling, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Jenner, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, garden city movement, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, Herman Kahn, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, natural language processing, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pirate software, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Salesforce, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, Turing machine, Twitter Arab Spring, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, young professional

Bernard Cohen, John Fauvel, Jack Howlett, Thomas Misa, Arthur Norberg, Judy O’Neill, Emerson Pugh, and Steve Russ. Our thanks go to numerous archivists who helped us to locate suitable illustrations and other historical materials; among them: Bruce Bruemmer and Kevin Corbett (formerly at the Charles Babbage Institute), Arvid Nelsen (Charles Babbage Institute), Debbie Douglas (MIT Museum), Paul Lasewicz (IBM Corporate Archives), Henry Lowood (Stanford University), Erik Rau (Hagley Library), Dag Spicer (Computer History Museum), and Erica Mosner (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton). For the first edition of this book Susan Rabiner of Basic Books took us by the hand and coached us on how to write for a general readership.

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A lifetime of computational dedication earned him a place in the Dictionary of National Biography. When Maskelyne died in 1811—Hitchins had died two years previously—the Nautical Almanac “fell on evil days for about 20 years, and even became notorious for its errors.” CHARLES BABBAGE AND TABLE MAKING During this period Charles Babbage became interested in the problem of table making and the elimination of errors in tables. Born in 1791, the son of a wealthy London banker, Babbage spent his childhood in Totnes, Devon, a country town in the west of England. He experienced indifferent schooling but succeeded in teaching himself mathematics to a considerable level.

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The world’s first practical stored-program computer had come to life, and with it the dawn of the computer age. FROM BABBAGE’S DIFFERENCE ENGINE TO SYSTEM/360 In 1820 the English mathematician Charles Babbage invented the Difference Engine, the first fully automatic computing machine. Babbage’s friend Ada Lovelace wrote a Sketch of the Analytical Engine (1843), which was the best description of the machine until recent times. In the 1970s the programming language Ada was named in Lovelace’s honor. BABBAGE PORTRAIT AND DIFFERENCE ENGINE COURTESY OF CHARLES BABBAGE INSTITUTE, UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA; LOVELACE PORTRAIT COURTESY OF SCIENCE MUSEUM, LONDON. The Central Telegraph Office, London, routed telegrams between British provincial towns.

A People’s History of Computing in the United States by Joy Lisi Rankin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, Apple II, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Charles Babbage, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, corporate social responsibility, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, Howard Zinn, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, language acquisition, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Multics, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, pink-collar, profit motive, public intellectual, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog, wikimedia commons

Bitzer, oral history interview by Sheldon Hochheiser, February 19, 1988, Charles Babbage Institute, retrieved from the University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy, http://­hdl​.­handle​.­net​/­11299​/­107121. 2. PLATO Quarterly Pro­gress Report for June–­August 1961, Box 22, Collection CBI 133: University of Illinois at Urbana-­ Champaign, Computer-­ Based Education Research Laboratory PLATO Reports, PLATO Documents and CERL Pro­g ress Reports (hereafter CBI PLATO Collection), Charles Babbage Institute, Minneapolis, Minnesota. 3. Donald Bitzer, oral history interview by Mollie Price, August 17, 1982, 19, Charles Babbage Institute. 4. Bitzer, 1988 interview. 5.

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Vyssotsky, “Proj­ect MAC (Time-­Sharing Computing Proj­ect),” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 14, no. 2 (1992): 9–13; F. J. Corbató, oral history interview with Fernando J. Corbató (1990), Charles Babbage Institute, retrieved from the University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy, http://­hdl​.­handle​.­net​/­11299​/­107230; Robert M. Fano, oral history interview with Robert M. Fano (1989), Charles Babbage Institute, retrieved from the University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy, http://­hdl​ .­handle​.­net​/­11299​/­107281; David Walden and Tom Van Vleck, eds., The Compatible Time Sharing System (1961–1973), 50th Anniversary Commemorative Overview (Washington, DC: IEEE Computer Society, 2011), http://­multicians​.­org​ /­t hvv​/­compatible​-­t ime​-­sharing​-­system​.­pdf; Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2010). 12.

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Minnesota School Districts Data Pro­cessing Joint Board (widely known and hereafter cited as TIES), TIES & TALES 1, no. 1 (September 15, 1967), Folder for TIES & TALES , Box 1, Total Information for Educational Systems (TIES) Rec­ords, Charles Babbage Institute. All issues of the TIES & TALES newsletters cited in this book ­were drawn from this TIES & TALES folder (in Box 1, TIES Rec­ords, Charles Babbage Institute), so archive information is omitted from subsequent citations. 5. John E. Haugo, “Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium,” April 1973, http://­eric​.­ed​.­gov​/­​?­id​=­ED087434. 6. Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (widely known and hereafter cited as MECC), Systems Update 2, no. 1 (February 1975): 3, microfilm, Minnesota Historical Society. 7.

Darwin Among the Machines by George Dyson

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, backpropagation, Bletchley Park, British Empire, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, Donald Davies, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, IFF: identification friend or foe, independent contractor, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, launch on warning, low earth orbit, machine readable, Menlo Park, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, phenotype, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, spectrum auction, strong AI, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, zero-sum game

., Philosophical Papers and Letters, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 1063. 7.Leibniz, 1685, “Machina arithmetica in qua non additio tantum et subtractio sed et multiplicatio nullo, divisio vero pæne nullo animi labore peragantur,” translated as “Leibniz on his Calculating Machine,” in D. E. Smith, ed., A Source Book in Mathematics, vol. 1 (New York: Dover, 1929), 180. 8.Leibniz, letter, n.d., quoted in H. W. Buxton, 1871, Memoir of the Life and Labours of the Late Charles Babbage Esq. F.R.S. (MS, 1871), Charles Babbage Institute Reprint Series for the History of Computing, vol. 13 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), 51, 381. 9.Leibniz, 1685, in Smith, Source Book, vol. 1, 180–181. 10.Leibniz, 1716, in Henry Rosemont, Jr., and Daniel J. Cook, trans, and eds., Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese (translation of “Lettre sur la philosophie chinoise à Nicolas de Remond”), Monograph of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy, no. 4 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1977), 158. 11.Leibniz, “De Progressione Dyadica—Pars I,” (MS, 15 March 1679), published in facsimile (with German translation) in Erich Hochstetter and Hermann-Josef Greve, eds., Herrn von Leibniz’ Rechnung mit Null und Eins (Berlin: Siemens Aktiengesellschaft, 1966), 46–47.

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Swade, “Redeeming Charles Babbage’s Mechanical Computer,” Scientific American 268, no. 2 (February 1993): 86. 23.Charles Darwin, 1876, in Nora Barlow, ed., The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–1882: with Original Omissions Restored, edited with Appendix and Notes by his Grand-daughter (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1958), 108. This reference to Babbage, and accompanying comments on Herbert Spencer, were deleted from the version published by Francis Darwin in 1896. 24.Ada Augusta Lovelace, Note A to L. F. Menabrea’s “Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage, Esq.,” Taylor’s Scientific Memoirs, vol. 3 (London: J.

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Taylor, 1843), reprinted in Henry Provost Babbage, ed., Babbage’s Calculating Engines: Being a Collection of Papers Relating to them; their History, and Construction (London: E. and F. Spon, 1889), 25. Facsimile reprint, Charles Babbage Institute Reprint Series for the History of Computing, vol. 2 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982). 25.Babbage, Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, 97. 26.Ibid., vii. 27.Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, 4th ed., enlarged (London: Charles Knight, 1835), 273–276. 28.Babbage, Passages, 128. 29.George Boole, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, on which are founded the mathematical theories of Logic and Probabilities (London: Macmillan, 1854), 1. 30.Herman Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), 153. 31.John von Neumann, “Probabilistic Logics and the Synthesis of Reliable Organisms from Unreliable Components,” in Claude E.

Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans

4chan, Ada Lovelace, air gap, Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Colossal Cave Adventure, computer age, crowdsourcing, D. B. Cooper, dark matter, dematerialisation, Doomsday Book, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, East Village, Edward Charles Pickering, game design, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Haight Ashbury, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, junk bonds, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Network effects, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, PalmPilot, pets.com, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, rolodex, San Francisco homelessness, semantic web, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Soul of a New Machine, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K

With pen and paper alone, the Naval Observatory team would chart the skies, just as other computing offices throughout the Western world would advance ballistics, maritime navigation, or pure mathematics. They wouldn’t receive much individual credit, but whatever the problem was, they’d have been instrumental in solving it. Computing offices were thinking factories. The nineteenth-century British mathematician Charles Babbage, whose desire to calculate by steam led to important early developments in mechanical computing, called what the human computing offices of his time did “mental labor.” He considered it work one did with the brain, just as hammering a nail is work one does with the arm. Indeed, computing was the grunt labor of organized science; before they were made obsolete, human computers prepared ballistics trajectories for the United States Army, cracked Nazi codes at Bletchley Park, crunched astronomical data at Harvard, and assisted numerical studies of nuclear fission on the Manhattan Project.

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Privately, he worried that, in his sympathy for the Luddites, he might be taken as “half a frame-breaker” himself. He was, of course, not—and he was dead wrong about the spider work, too. Even as Byron made his case, Jacquard looms were producing a quality and volume of textiles unlike anything the world had ever seen. The mathematician Charles Babbage owned a portrait of Joseph-Marie Jacquard woven from thousands of silk threads using twenty-four thousand punched cards, a weaving so intricate that it was regularly mistaken for an engraving by his guests. And although the portrait was a fine possession, it was the loom itself, and its punch card programs, that really ignited Babbage’s imagination.

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When Ada finally learned her father’s name, she wept for him, although it doesn’t appear that she or her mother held his legacy in high esteem—Byron’s portrait, in their home, was concealed under heavy drapery until Ada was twenty. But his mercurial spirit was alive in her. “I do not believe that my father was (or ever could have been) such a Poet as I shall be an Analyst; (& Metaphysician),” she wrote to Charles Babbage later in life, “for with me the two go together indissolubly.” Ada King, Countess of Lovelace Ada’s sharp analytical mind was inflected by a wild imagination. Prevented from a formal university education by her gender, she thrived under private tutelage. A precocious and very lonely child, she designed flying machines and marched around the billiard table playing violin.

The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray and the Technical Wizards Behind the Supercomputer by Charles J. Murray

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Charles Babbage, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, John von Neumann, lateral thinking, pattern recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Salesforce, Silicon Valley

Standing on the loadil1g dock of CDC's first headquarters at 501 Park Avenue in Min- neapolis, from left to right: William Norris, Frank Mullaney, George Hanson, and a North American Van Lines representative, January 1960. (Photo courtesy of Charles Babbage Institute) · 1604 --- EX /' I I --- "..,.. j t, L . . .. . .. . . r - , W IG , .., { \'" , ' Ii .. - .' '.....: .' . , " .. , fI, 1 J Complete CDC 1604 system, early 1960s. The CDC 1604 had a processor speed of 5 microseconds, equivalent to 0.2 mega- hertz. By comparison, many desktop computers in 1996 offered speeds of 133 megahertz. (Photo courtesy of Charles Babbage Institute) / 97 William C. Norris, president of Control Data Corporation, 1963. (Photo courtesy of Charles Babbage Institute. ) \ ,. . , t.

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The CDC 6600 is often regarded as the first supercomputer. (Photo courtesy of Charles Babbage Institute) 98 / . " " . , " Seymour Cray at the console of a CDC 6600 computer at a press conference, August 1963. (Photo courtesy of Charles Bab- bage Institute) Seymour Cray with the CDC 7600 computer, 1968. (Photo courtesy of Charles Babbage Institute) .llllt'ltl' . 11111".1.1. flree'ttttl' Itl'.IIIIII. I : I J J t : : : : I to k { ...::: ...... fttl, r , / 99 Seymour Cray with the CRAY-1, 1974. (Photo courtesy of Charles Babbage Institute) - '" . tI jli C .f liS,...e . ..

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.- , .... . . .. .. .. . . . . . . "\ .. '" . , .... ',I. . I . .. ..- , .. ,- . . - . . , ,,"' "I I" c" '. .. .. II \ ., ... L.... ...' .... . . ... ,- Engineering Research Associates laboratory scene, 1951. (Photo courtesy of Charles Babbage Institute) John Parker, president of ERA, 1950. (Photo cour- tesy of Charles Babbage Institute) .. .... . .. 4 -" I I . 1,,1. '.A .,:u.. " ...., II - / 95 PO, \"10 "'\.- 1 ( '. . . . J . . " rr .... · .I-. . ." J _ . i ...... '" " "'.... .. .. ...... ............... \ If''t. 'tow

The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, British Empire, Charles Babbage, Copley Medal, Dava Sobel, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Jenner, Etonian, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Harrison: Longitude, music of the spheres, placebo effect, polynesian navigation, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade route, unbiased observer, University of East Anglia, éminence grise

Between 1829 and 1831 a series of publications by John Herschel, his friend Charles Babbage and the Scottish science writer David Brewster (who had done fine research work on polarised light) pursued the emotive theme of the supposed ‘decline of Science in Britain’. The debate was taken up by the leading journals, rapidly moved beyond the Royal Society, and became one about national culture and the role of the man of science in society. It was no coincidence that all this took place at the same time as the national self-questioning reflected in the violent political debates surrounding the Great Reform Bill. 2 The first salvo was fired by Charles Babbage, when he released a slim but carefully targeted volume, provocatively entitled Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, in the spring of 1830.

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., Dialogue VI, p382 138 Janet Browne, Charles Darwin, vol 1, 2003, p30 139 JD Memoirs, 1839 140 John Tobin, Journal of a Tour whilst accompanying the late Sir Humphry Davy, 1832, p5 141 JD Fragments, p268 142 JD Fragments, to Jane, September 1827, p296 143 HD Archive Mss Box 25/80, to Jane, 1 September 1828 144 John Herschel, On the Study of Natural Philosophy, 1830, pp342-4 and footnote 145 HD Archive Mss Box 14 (M) pp105-6 146 JD Fragments, Jane to Davy, late March 1829, p313 147 John Davy’s affectionate account, in JD Memoirs, p412 148 JD Memoirs, p408 Chapter 10: Young Scientists 1 In a series of gloomy articles, e.g. The Times, 28 June 1832. See Marie Boas Hall, All Scientists Now, CUP, 1984 2 Edinburgh Review, 49, 1829, pp439-59; and Hamilton, p270 3 Thomas Carlye, Sartor Resartus, 1833 4 Anthony Hyman, ‘Charles Babbage: Science and Reform’, in Cambridge Scientific Minds, edited by Peter Harman and Simon Mitton, CUP, 2002 5 Charles Babbage, The Decline of Science in England, 1830, p102 6 Ibid., p152 7 Ibid., p44 8 Ibid., p102 9 Ibid., p174 10 Ibid., pp203-12 11 Ibid., p210 12 Ibid., p200 13 Hamilton, p229 14 J.S. Mill, Autobiography, 1870, p124 15 John Herschel, A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, 1831, p4 16 Ruskin, pp117-21 17 Natural Philosophy, 1830, Part II 18 Ibid., p191 19 Ibid., p4 20 Ibid., p20 21 Ibid., pp14-15 22 Ibid., p55-6 23 Ibid., pp299-303 24 Ibid., pp329-40 25 Ibid., p340 26 Faraday to John Herschel, 10 November 1832, Correspondence, vol 1, p623 27 Charles Darwin to W.D.

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It celebrates a deeply Romantic idea of exploration and discovery. Without actually naming Herschel, it picks out the finding of Uranus, thirty-five years before, as one of the defining moments of the age. Although combining many sources of inspiration (it is possible that Keats may have attended Charles Babbage’s 1815 ‘Lectures on Astronomy’ at the Royal Institution), the poem itself was written in less than four hours. Keats was twenty, and attending a full-time medical course at Guy’s Hospital. He had stayed out all night with his friend and mentor Charles Cowden Clarke at his house in Clerkenwell, drinking and discussing poetry.

The Man Who Invented the Computer by Jane Smiley

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Bletchley Park, British Empire, c2.com, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Henri Poincaré, IBM and the Holocaust, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Karl Jansky, machine translation, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Pierre-Simon Laplace, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Turing machine, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture

While Atanasoff was pondering the Laplaciometer, Aiken, at Harvard, was trying to conceive of a way to improve Charles Babbage’s original Difference Engine. Harvard offered Aiken even less support than Atanasoff found at Iowa State College—in fact, President Conant actively discouraged him. Aiken then approached several mechanical calculating machine companies without success. Most computer inventors in the 1930s, including Vannevar Bush and Howard Aiken, were convinced that the future of computing lay in its past—in the theories of Charles Babbage (1791–1871), who had begun laying out his ideas for a mechanical calculator in 1822 and proposed constructing it to the Royal Astronomical Society.

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The obituary in the Telegraph pointed out a further irony: “Flowers received very little remuneration from the government for his invention … barely sufficient to pay off the debts that he had run up while developing Colossus.” According to most sources his insufficient remuneration amounted to about £1,000 (some $40,000 in 2010 dollars, or about five times what Atanasoff had been granted for the development of the ABC). Charles Babbage, 1791–1871, inventor of the Difference Engine and Analytical Engine, analog computing devices. (Photograph courtesy of the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis) A section of Babbage’s Difference Engine, showing rods and gears. (Science Museum/SSPL) Vannevar Bush with his Differential Analyzer, 1931. (Courtesy MIT Museum) John Vincent Atanasoff, around the time he completed his PhD at the University of Wisconsin.

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Travis felt that the fact that the research was being done under the sponsorship of the military and the university meant that individual researchers did not have property rights in the research. He also felt that the ENIAC patents as they were eventually submitted did not give sufficient credit to other members of the research team, especially Arthur Burks—whom Travis considered “brilliant.” In his interview with Nancy Stern, for the Charles Babbage Institute of the University of Minnesota, he also suggested that the president of Penn, an English professor, had given in to coercion on the part of Mauchly and Eckert, who had threatened not to complete ENIAC if they did not gain patent rights to the machine. The patent dispute quickly escalated, driven, according to Scott McCartney, on the part of Travis and other Moore School engineers by the feeling that Mauchly was an outsider (having not gotten his degrees at the Moore School), while Eckert was volatile and difficult to get along with (by this time nearly twenty-seven years old and having earned only a bachelor’s degree).

The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution by Charles R. Morris

air freight, American ideology, British Empire, business process, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, clean water, colonial exploitation, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, en.wikipedia.org, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, if you build it, they will come, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, lone genius, manufacturing employment, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, refrigerator car, Robert Gordon, scientific management, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, undersea cable

Even today, ultraprecision computerized machine tools work at precisions of a few hundred thousandths of an inch. Whitworth’s measuring machine still pales beside the most audacious grasp at ultraprecise complexity. The ne plus ultra of regal overreaching was Charles Babbage’s calculating engines. Charles Babbage If there were a hall of fame of intelligent people, Charles Babbage (1791–1871) would surely have his own plaque. Born into a well-to-do family, he spent most of his career in academia and for a dozen years held the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge University, a post graced by luminaries from Isaac Newton through Stephen Hawking.24 In Babbage’s day, all calculation-intensive sciences like astronomy were dependent on thick volumes of standard tables—logarithms, sines, and other functions—each incorporating decades of laborious construction.

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A British Civil War buffs’ organization (www.americancivilwar.org.uk/index.php) has many details on the sales and use of the Whitworth rifle during the Civil War. 21 The account here including the Whitworth solution is drawn primarily from Goodeve and Shelley, The Whitworth Measuring Machine. 22 Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 13, no. 1 (1852): 123–125, quote at 124. 23 Ibid., 124. 24 Doron Swade, The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer (New York: Viking, 2001), is the best modern account of Babbage and his calculating engines. 25 Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, 1864), 68–96, is his own account of the struggle over funding. Not all the dates agree with Swade’s, which I take to be the definitive account. 26 Roe, English and American Tool Builders, chapter titled “Inventors of the Planer,” quotes from 52, 59. 27 Babbage, Passages.

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Not all the dates agree with Swade’s, which I take to be the definitive account. 26 Roe, English and American Tool Builders, chapter titled “Inventors of the Planer,” quotes from 52, 59. 27 Babbage, Passages. The disputed phrase quoted in the footnote is on 71. 28 The description of number two and the rejection note are from Swade, Difference Engine, 173–176. 29 Ibid., 117–119. 30 Ibid., 121. 31 Charles Babbage, “On the Method of Expressing by Signs the Action of Machinery,” Philosophic Transactions of the Royal Society, vol. 2, 1826, reprinted in Charles Babbage and His Calculating Machines, Philip Morrison and Emily Morrison, eds. (New York: Dover, 1961), 346–354, quote at 351, plates at 380–384. 32 Swade, personal communication. 33 Babbage, Passages, 452. 34 The account here is from Swade, “A Modern Sequel,” Part 3 in Difference Engine. 35 Swade, Difference Engine, 292. 36 Ibid., 305.

From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry by Martin Campbell-Kelly

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, business process, card file, Charles Babbage, computer age, computer vision, continuous integration, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, Donald Knuth, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, history of Unix, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, information asymmetry, inventory management, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Larry Ellison, linear programming, longitudinal study, machine readable, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, Network effects, popular electronics, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, SimCity, software patent, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, vertical integration

Chapter 2: ICP Software Directory, volume 1: Data Processing Management, January 1977, p. 97. Courtesy of Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Chapter 3: Datamation, November 1965, p. 121. Reproduced with permission of Computer Associates and Walter F. Bauer. Chapter 4: From personal papers of Martin Goetz. Reproduced with permission of Computer Associates and Martin Goetz. Chapter 5: System Development Corporation monthly magazine, April 1959, p. 11. Courtesy of Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Chapter 6: Datamation special report, September 1981, p. 64.

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Bernard Cohen, Howard Aiken: Portrait of a Computer Pioneer I. Bernard Cohen and Gregory W. Welch, editors, Makin’ Numbers: Howard Aiken and the Computer John Hendry, Innovating for Failure: Government Policy and the Early British Computer Industry Michael Lindgren, Glory and Failure: The Difference Engines of Johann Müller, Charles Babbage, and Georg and Edvard Scheutz David E. Lundstrom, A Few Good Men from Univac René Moreau, The Computer Comes of Age: The People, the Hardware, and the Software Emerson W. Pugh, Building IBM: Shaping an Industry and Its Technology Emerson W. Pugh, Memories That Shaped an Industry Emerson W. Pugh, Lyle R.

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To my chagrin I have acquired a cell phone, but I have not yet succumbed to videogames. And, yes, we still have yellow Post-Its stuck to the front door. This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments Many individuals and organizations helped me in producing this book. It is a particular pleasure to acknowledge the help of my friends at the Charles Babbage Institute, at the University of Minnesota: Director Arthur Norberg and Associate Director Jeff Yost allowed me to participate in the organization of a conference on The Emergence of the Software Product (Palo Alto, September 2000) and to slightly subvert the agenda to my own ends. Archivists Bruce Brummer and Beth Kaplan facilitated my access to the Institute’s holdings.

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil

Ada Lovelace, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, fudge factor, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, information retrieval, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jacquard loom, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, ought to be enough for anybody, pattern recognition, phenotype, punch-card reader, quantum entanglement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K

Babbage describes the features of his machine in “On the Mathematical Powers of the Calculating Engine,” written in 1837 and reprinted as appendix B in Anthony Hyman’s Charles Babbage: Pioneer of the Computer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). For biographical information on Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, see Hyman’s biography, and Dorothy Stein’s book Ada: A Life and a Legacy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985). 2 Stan Augarten, Bit by Bit, 63-64. Babbage’s description of the Analytical Engine in “On the Mathematical Powers of the Calculating Engine,” written in 1837, is reprinted as appendix B in Anthony Hyman’s Charles Babbage: Pioneer of the Computer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). 3 Joel Shurkin, in Engines of the Mind, p. 104, describes Aiken’s machine as “an electromechanical Analytical Engine with IBM card handling.”

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His earliest contrivances to support uncivilized life were tools of the simplest and rudest construction. His latest achievements in the substitution of machinery, not merely for the skill of the human hand, but for the relief of the human intellect, are founded on the use of tools of a still higher order. —Charles Babbage All of the fundamental processes we have examined—the development of the Universe, the evolution of life-forms, the subsequent evolution of technology—have all progressed in an exponential fashion, some slowing down, some speeding up. What is the common thread here? Why did cosmology exponentially slow down while evolution accelerated?

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—Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Artificial stupidity (AS) may be defined as the attempt by computer scientists to create computer programs capable of causing problems of a type normally associated with human thought. —Wallace Marshal Artificial intelligence (AI) is the science of how to get machines to do the things they do in the movies. —Astro Teller The Ballad of Charles and Ada Returning to the evolution of intelligent machines, we find Charles Babbage sitting in the rooms of the Analytical Society at Cambridge, England, in 1821, with a table of logarithms lying before him. “Well, Babbage, what are you dreaming about?” asked another member, seeing Babbage half asleep. “I am thinking that all these tables might be calculated by machinery!” Babbage replied.

Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty by Vikram Chandra

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Apple II, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, British Empire, business process, Californian Ideology, Charles Babbage, conceptual framework, create, read, update, delete, crowdsourcing, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, East Village, European colonialism, finite state, Firefox, Flash crash, functional programming, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Hacker News, haute couture, hype cycle, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, land reform, London Whale, Norman Mailer, Paul Graham, pink-collar, revision control, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, tech worker, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, theory of mind, Therac-25, Turing machine, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce

That is, I worked within a certain language and formal system of rules, I knew how the syntax of this language could be arranged to affect changes in a series of metaphors—the “file system,” the “desktop,” “Windows”—but the best understanding I had of what existed under these conceptualizations was a steampunk-ish series of gearwheels taken from illustrations of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine. So now I made an attempt to get closer to the metal, to follow the effects of my code down into the machine. 3 THE LANGUAGE OF LOGIC The seven lines of the “Hello, world!” code at the beginning of this book—written in Microsoft’s C# language—do nothing until they are swallowed and munched by a specialized program called a compiler, which translates them into thirty-odd lines of “Common Intermediate Language” (CIL) that look like this: This, as the name of the language indicates, is a mediating dialect between human and machine.

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At last we have computation, which is—according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)—the “action or process of computing, reckoning, or counting; arithmetical or mathematical calculation.” A “computer” was originally, as the OED also tells us, a “person who makes calculations or computations; a calculator, a reckoner; spec. a person employed to make calculations in an observatory, in surveying, etc.” Charles Babbage set out to create a machine that would replace the vast throngs of human computers who worked out logarithmic and trigonometric tables; what we’ve sketched out above are the beginnings of a mechanism which can do exactly that and more. You can use the output of the half adder as input for other mechanisms, and also continue to add logic gates to it to perform more complex operations.

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You can then put together cascades of full adders to add binary numbers eight columns wide, or sixteen, or thirty-two. This adding machine “knows” nothing; it is just a clever arrangement of physical objects that can go from one state to another, and by doing so cause changes in other physical objects. The revolutionary difference between it and the first device that Charles Babbage built, the Difference Engine, is that it represents data and logic in zeros and ones, in discrete digits—it is “digital,” as opposed to the earlier “analog” devices, all the way back through slide rules and astrolabes and the Antikythera mechanism. Babbage’s planned second device, the Analytical Engine, would have been a digital, programmable computer, but the technology and engineering of his time was not able to implement what he had imagined.

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Book of Ingenious Devices, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, colonial exploitation, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, game design, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, HyperCard, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Minecraft, moral panic, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, Necker cube, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pets.com, placebo effect, pneumatic tube, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, SimCity, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, talking drums, the built environment, The Great Good Place, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, working poor, Wunderkammern

But sometimes history is shaped by chance encounters, far from the corridors of power, moments when an idea takes root in someone’s head and lingers there for years until it makes its way onto the main stage of global change. One of those encounters happens in 1801, when a mother brings her precocious eight-year-old son to visit Merlin’s museum. His name is Charles Babbage. The old showman senses something promising in the boy and offers to take him up to the attic to spark his curiosity even further. The boy is charmed by the walking lady. “The motions of her limbs were singularly graceful,” he would recall many years later. But it is the dancer that seduces him.

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Everyone knows the old saying “Necessity is the mother of invention,” but if you do a paternity test on many of the modern world’s most important ideas or institutions, you will find, invariably, that leisure and play were involved in the conception as well. Although this account contains its fair share of figures like Charles Babbage—well-to-do Europeans tinkering with new ideas in their parlors—it is not just a story about the affluent West. One of the most intriguing plot twists in the story of leisure and delight is how many of the devices or materials originated outside of Europe: those mesmerizing automata from the House of Wisdom, the intriguing fashions of calico and chintz imported from India, the gravity-defying rubber balls invented by Mesoamericans, the clove and nutmeg first tasted by remote Indonesian islanders.

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“Using the Jacquard loom,” James Essinger writes, “it was possible for a skilled weaver to produce two feet of stunningly beautiful decorated silk fabric every day compared with the one inch of fabric per day that was the best that could be managed with the drawloom.” Joseph-Marie Jacquard displaying his loom The Jacquard loom, patented in 1804, stands today as one of the most significant innovations in the history of textile production. But its most important legacy lies in the world of computation. In 1839, Charles Babbage wrote a letter to an astronomer friend in Paris, inquiring about a portrait he had just encountered in London, a portrait that when viewed from across the room seemed to have been rendered in oil paints, but on closer inspection turned out to be woven entirely out of silk. The subject of the portrait was Joseph-Marie Jacquard himself.

Dealers of Lightning by Michael A. Hiltzik

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Boeing 747, business cycle, Charles Babbage, computer age, creative destruction, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, index card, Ivan Sutherland, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, L Peter Deutsch, luminiferous ether, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, oil shock, popular electronics, reality distortion field, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

He never tired: White If the new research center: Goldman, Proposal for a New Corporate Advanced Scientific & Systems Laboratory, 6/23/69. Chapter 3: The House on Porter Drive I’m one of the oldest: Wes Clark Oral History, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota That of a very large: Clark, “The LINC Was Early and Small” in Goldberg (ed.), A History of Personal Workstations, p. 357. (Italics in original.) Time-sharers were still: Clark oral history. At that time computers: Severo Ornstein Oral History, Charles Babbage Institute. During his time at ARPA: Robert Taylor, J. C. R. Licklider oral histories, Charles Babbage Institute Taylor conversation with Herzfeld: Taylor oral history; Taylor to author, 9/10/98.

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Ornstein, Severo, interview by Judy O’Neill, Woodside, Cal., 6 March 1990. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minn. Sutherland, Ivan, interview by William Aspray, Pittsburgh, Penn., 1 May 1989. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minn. Taylor, Robert W., interview by William Aspray, Palo Alto, Calif., 28 February 1989. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minn. Acknowledgments In a very real sense this book was born one day in September 1996, when Steve Jobs came to lunch at the Los Angeles Times. As a technology reporter for the newspaper I was invited to join the select company.

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Oral Histories Clark, Wesley, interview by Judy O’Neill, New York, N.Y., 3 May 1990. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minn. Engelbart, Douglas C., interview by Jon Eklund, Washington, D.C., 4 May 1984. National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Jobs, Steven P., interview by Daniel Morrow, Palo Alto, Calif., 20 April 1995. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Licklider, J. C. R., interview by William Aspray and Arthur L. Norberg, Cambridge, Mass., 28 October 1988. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minn. Ornstein, Severo, interview by Judy O’Neill, Woodside, Cal., 6 March 1990.

Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Writing Science) by Thierry Bardini

Apple II, augmented reality, Bill Duvall, Charles Babbage, classic study, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, hypertext link, index card, information retrieval, invention of hypertext, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Rulifson, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Multics, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, packet switching, Project Xanadu, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Silicon Valley, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Ted Nelson, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, unbiased observer, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

Personal interview with the author, March 19, Mountain View, Calif. Cerf, V. 1990. Personal interview conducted by Judy O'Neill, April 24, Reston, Va. Center for the History of Information Processing, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis: The Charles Babbage Institute. Clark, W. 1990. Personal interview conducted by Judy O'Neill, May 3, New York, N. Y. Center for the History of Information Processing, University of Min- nesota, Minneapolis: The Charles Babbage Institute. Deutsch, P. 1996. Personal interview with the author, May 29, Mountain View, Calif. Engelbart, D. C. 1968. "Augmenting Your Intellect." Research/Development, Au- gust: 22-27. . I992.

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Sutherland, I. E. 1989. Personal interview conducted by William Aspray, May I, Pittsburgh, Pa. Center for the HIstory of Information Processing, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis: The Charles Babbage Institute. Taylor, R. I989. Personal interview conducted by William Aspray, February 28, Palo Alto, Calif. Center for the HIstory of InformatIon Processing, UniversIty of Minnesota, Minneapolis: The Charles Babbage Institute. . 1993. Personal interview with the author, Palo Alto, Calif., March 18. Uncapher, K. 1993. Personal intervIew wIth the author, Los Angeles, Calif., Febru- ary I 6. Vallee, J.

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There was an Army Research office out at Durham, North CarolIna, that was represented. I represented NASA. . . . The National Institute of Health was repre- sented" (Taylor 1989). 17. This information was obtained dUrIng my own personal intervIew wIth Rob- ert Taylor (1993) and confirmed In the Charles Babbage Institute oral hIstory Inter- view (1989). 18. For example, starting in 1965, Taylor annually called together the IPTO prIn- cipal investigators for a two-day or three-day meeting. Taylor also visited each of his funded projects for several days each year, which provided him with an opportunity to observe various styles for managing research and development on computing.

One Day in August: Ian Fleming, Enigma, and the Deadly Raid on Dieppe by David O’keefe

anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, card file, Charles Babbage, computer age, conceptual framework, friendly fire, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Suez canal 1869, trade route, trickle-down economics

Following his death in 1964, the collection was purchased from his estate by Indiana University where it resides today. The author would like to thank Joel Silver for his kind help in sorting through the massive collection. 18. Charles Babbage, The Writings of Charles Babbage (Alvin, TX: Halcyon Press, 2009), Kindle edition; Bruce Collier and James MacLachlan, Charles Babbage and the Engines of Perfection (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Abdul Montaqim, Pioneers of the Computer Age: From Charles Babbage to Steve Jobs (London: Monsoon Media, 2012). The vast collection at Indiana University includes Babbage’s ‘Reflexions on the decline of science in England, and some of its causes’ from 1830 and the work of Dionysius Lardner, who in 1834 penned a review of seven papers by or about Babbage’s work including the Second ‘Difference Engine’ and one on a projected analytical machine. 19.

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Babbage, Charles. On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures. 1832. Babbage, Charles. Reflections on the Decline of Science in England. 1830. ——. The Writings of Charles Babbage. Houston, TX: Halcyon Press, 2009. Kindle edition. Carter, Frank. Breaking Naval Enigma: An Account of the Additional Problems Encountered and the Methods Used to Solve Them. Bletchley, UK: Bletchley Park Trust, 2008. Collier, Bruce, and James MacLachlan. Charles Babbage: And the Engines of Perfection. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Copeland, Jack B. Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park’s Code-breaking Computers.

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Although I began my research that same year, the story has emerged slowly and I did not have a single ‘eureka’ moment as such, but rather a string of significant and exciting finds, and countless hours of dead ends, that in the end allowed the pieces of the puzzle to fall into place. It was the painstaking assembly of minuscule pieces of evidence – balanced, sorted and weighed against other evidence – that has finally allowed me to tell the ‘untold’ story of Dieppe. New technologies such as the internet, the microchip and digitization – ones that would have delighted Charles Babbage, Alan Turing, Frank Birch and Ian Fleming – have allowed me to consult more than 150,000 pages of documents from archives on two continents and over 50,000 pages of published primary and secondary source material for this book. The methodology I employ is straightforward, based in large part on the sage advice of a multitude of mentors in the historical realm and, perhaps rather ironically, on the musings of Colonel Peter Wright, the man who served as General Ham Roberts’s intelligence officer aboard the Calpe.

Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator by Keith Houston

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Andy Kessler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple II, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, classic study, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Grace Hopper, human-factors engineering, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, machine readable, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Neil Armstrong, off-by-one error, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, popular electronics, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert X Cringely, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Home Computer Revolution, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, V2 rocket, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War

Morland’s machines may not have been as groundbreaking or, indeed, as useful as their inventor imagined, but he can rightfully claim authorship of the first meaningful text on computing machinery. The 1673 book in which he describes his inventions, The Description and Use of Two Arithmetick Instruments, was the first and only substantial text to be published on the subject before Charles Babbage would revive it in the nineteenth century.55 For that alone, Morland deserves a place in the annals of computing history. It may seem odd to dwell on three machines that never fulfilled their promise. Schickard’s machines were struck by disaster and lost to obscurity; the Pascaline was confined to the closeted world of the idle rich; and Samuel Morland’s devices were overshadowed by his picaresque lifestyle.

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A growing number of scientific theorems and instruments could be adequately addressed only by “nonlinear” equations that could not be solved by multiplication and division alone.43 To simulate the propagation of radio waves in the upper atmosphere or to tackle Einstein’s theory of relativity with a slide rule was to paddle up the Mississippi with a Popsicle stick. In a 1937 memo that invoked John Napier, Wilhelm Leibniz, Blaise Pascal, and Charles Babbage, Aiken imagined a hypothetical calculating machine that could handle numbers of dizzying precision, that would be driven by punched cards or perforated paper tape, and that would iterate happily toward solutions without human supervision.44 Aiken made a point of comparing his “automatic calculating machine” to the tabulating machines then offered by IBM, which had to be rewired for each new step of an algorithm.45 IBM had been around in one form or another since its founder, Herman Hollerith, had first used punched cards to help tabulate the 1890 U.S. census, but its machines had always been designed for breadth rather than depth.46 An IBM tabulator could compute the monthly payroll for thousands of employees, but it balked at more intricate calculations.

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Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1944. http://waywiser.fas.harvard.edu/objects/20119/ibm-asccmark-i-photo-album-leftright-panorama-of-mark-i-d. Image courtesy of Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University. There is a striking comparison to be drawn between Howard Aiken and Grace Hopper on the one hand and Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace on the other. One of Aiken’s many inspirations, Babbage was the irascible nineteenth-century genius behind the fabled “analytical engine,” a mechanical computer that, had it ever been completed, would have pre-dated all other general-purpose computers, the ASCC included.56 Ada King, countess of Lovelace and the only child of the infamously “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” Lord Byron, saw more clearly than Babbage himself how the analytical engine could be turned to myriad different purposes.57 Aiken and Babbage may have invented the hardware, but Hopper and Lovelace understood that software was the key to making the best of it.

The Regency Revolution: Jane Austen, Napoleon, Lord Byron and the Making of the Modern World by Robert Morrison

British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, financial independence, full employment, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, New Urbanism, railway mania, stem cell, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, wage slave

(London: Longmans, Green, 1870), 1. 403; Sir Humphry Davy, “New Experiments on Some of the Combinations of Phosphorus” in Philosophical Magazine, 52 (1818), 443. 76. Michael Lindgren, Glory and Failure: The Difference Engines of Johann Müller, Charles Babbage, and Georg and Edvard Scheutz, trans. Craig McKay (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 37. 77. Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (London: Long-man, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1864), 42. 78. Byron, PW, 2. 76. 79. Cronin, 85–86; Cyrus Redding, “Blues and Anti-Blues” in New Monthly Magazine, 2 (1821), 223. 80. Sharon Ruston, Shelley and Vitality (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), 24–63; John Abernethy, An Enquiry into the Probability and Rationality of Mr.

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Turner, the Duke of Wellington, and of course the Regent himself. But there were dozens of other figures who made a decisive contribution to the period, including athletes (Tom Cribb), artists (Mary Linwood and Thomas Rowlandson), engineers (Thomas Telford), explorers (John Franklin), inventors (Charles Babbage), journalists (Pierce Egan), novelists (Mary Brunton and Maria Edgeworth), poets (John Clare), reformers (Elizabeth Fry and Robert Owen), and scientists (Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday). While I recognize the deep continuities between the Regency and the decades that both preceded and followed it, I believe the Regency is perhaps the most extraordinary decade in all of British history.

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In many instances, they were delivered by the foremost authorities of the day, and arranged by learned societies like the Royal Institution where, for a subscription, members could gather to enjoy fine dining, the library, and the newsroom, in addition to the guest speaker. John Flaxman lectured on sculpture, John Soane on architecture, Charles Babbage on astronomy, John Dalton on chemistry, and William Lawrence on comparative anatomy. Byron and Lamb heard Coleridge lecture on Shakespeare and Milton in 1811, and Wordsworth was in attendance the following year when Coleridge was again at the rostrum, this time to speak on European drama. The New Monthly Magazine applauded J.

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning by Justin E. H. Smith

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Adrian Hon, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic management, artificial general intelligence, Big Tech, Charles Babbage, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, dark matter, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, game design, gamification, global pandemic, GPT-3, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kuiper Belt, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meme stock, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, passive income, Potemkin village, printed gun, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, Skype, strong AI, technological determinism, theory of mind, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, you are the product

Yet, as an imaginative representation of their power, the idea of an omniscient demon that sits in our home and answers questions for us has been a significant incentive in the effort to find the proper arrangement of gears and circuits to simulate such a thing. In other words, if Bacon (or someone like him) had not had his fantasy in the thirteenth century (or something like it), perhaps Leibniz would not have designed his reckoning engine in the seventeenth century, and Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage would not have created their analytical engine in the nineteenth century, and so on down to the present day. Alongside the history of computer science narrowly understood, we should perhaps chart a parallel history, an imaginary museum of all the machines that only existed as fantasy, as rumor, as mere items on a wish list alongside so many other things that the alchemists and conjurers knew how to envision but had no idea how to bring about: perpetual motion machines, universal solvents, artificial life.

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In addition to being an illustrious woman of what is today known under the impoverished label of “STEM,” Lovelace also provided, more clearly than any of her contemporaries, an explicit account of the overlap between the history of weaving and the history of computing. Born in 1815, while still a teenager in the early 1830s Lovelace began a long collaboration with the mathematician Charles Babbage, who is best known for his work on the so-called Analytical Engine. Prior to meeting Lovelace, Babbage had by 1822 already designed a “Difference Engine,” a mechanical calculator that advanced beyond the early modern reckoning engines of Leibniz and others in that its primary use was in tabulating polynomial functions.

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.), Gartenkultur im Spannungsfeld zwischen Arkadien und Soldatenfriedhöfen, Munich: Thomas Martin Verlagsgesellschaft, 2015. Franciscus Linus, Tractatus de corporum inseparabilitate, London, 1661. Ada Lovelace, “Notes by the Translator” on L. F. Menabrea, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage,” in Richard Taylor (ed.), Scientific Memoirs, selected from the Transactions of Foreign Academies of Science and Learned Societies, London: Richard and John Taylor, 1843. Lucian, A True History, trans. Francis Hickes, London: A. H. Bullen, 1902 [1894]. Hermann Lotze, Geschichte der Aesthetik in Deutschland, Munich: G.

Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All by Robert Elliott Smith

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, affirmative action, AI winter, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, gig economy, Gödel, Escher, Bach, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Linda problem, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, p-value, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, post-truth, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

The next step in the evolution of computing factories was to come from an Englishman whose career was partially inspired by an automaton not unlike those created by Vaucanson decades before. In the last year of the eighteenth century, eight-year-old Charles Babbage saw a silver automaton of a naked woman in a Covent Garden amusement shop. When writing his autobiography over sixty years later, Babbage recalled the moment he first saw The Silver Lady, saying that the automaton‘attudinized in a most fascinating manner. Her eyes were full of imagination, and irresistible’. Charles Babbage grew to become a mathematician and mechanical engineer whose accomplishments are vast and span everything from modern economics to the pricing of postage stamps, but his most famous accomplishment evolved from his realization of the one great flaw in de Prony’s human computer factories.

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The Pascaline was invented by Blaise Pascal, the most famous mathematician of the previous generation, and devices that descend from it would be used for number processing well into the twentieth century. A form of Pascaline mechanism, including Leibniz’s innovations, would in time be incorporated into Charles Babbage’s 1822 mechanical calculator, the Difference Engine, and then into the first ‘general purpose’ computing devices that followed in its wake. Through general purpose computation, the Llull-inspired idea of computing over symbols (rather than numbers) to operate on challenging human issues would in time turn into AI.

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As the daughter of the most notorious man in England, Ada basked in the legacy of her father’s celebrity, but in order to shelter her from her father’s excess of poetic sensibility, her mother had her strictly tutored in science and mathematics, at which she excelled. Her wealth, fame, position and intellect gave her access to many of the great scientists, technologists and thinkers of the day, including Michael Faraday, Charles Dickens and Charles Babbage. At the time of their meeting, in 1833, Babbage was forty-two and already one of the most famous inventors in England, while Ada was just eighteen. Still, Babbage was so impressed with Ada’s intellect, he showed her the incomplete prototype of his Difference Engine, and so began a long working relationship and friendship.

In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence by George Zarkadakis

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Asperger Syndrome, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, British Empire, business process, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, continuous integration, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Edward Snowden, epigenetics, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, intentional community, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, machine translation, millennium bug, mirror neurons, Moravec's paradox, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, post-industrial society, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

The influence of mechanical automata in Hoffmann’s work is not surprising – after all, this was the age when the mechanical Turk was touring Europe and setting alight the imagination of writers and artists. Hoffmann’s work, as well as the ballets based on his stories, would later influence two of the most important heroes in the history of Artificial Intelligence, the English mathematician Charles Babbage and Lord Byron’s daughter Ada Lovelace. These two would go on to invent the first general-purpose computer and write the first computer program respectively. But the achievements of Babbage and Ada still lay in the future at the time when Byron and his friends delved into Hoffmann’s dark fantasy world.

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Back to our time machine – destination Victorian London. 13 THE PROGRAM On the second floor of the Science Museum in London the interested visitor will come across a section dedicated to the history of modern computing. The section begins with a display of a nineteenth-century computational machine that was designed and built by one of the most celebrated prodigies of Victorian England, the eminent mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer Charles Babbage (1791–1871). Arguably, this is a contentious proposition by the curators. If this were a section dedicated to evolutionary biology many scientists would be aghast. Presenting Babbage’s Difference Engine as the starting point in the evolution of computing is akin to a creationist’s account of human evolution, like showing Adam and Eve having sprung forth ex nihilo by the grace, and genius, of the superior being that created them.

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The historical merging of those two different technologies, the mechanical-physical and the logico-mathematical symbolic, would determine the dual nature of modern computing, and its separation into hardware and software. Nevertheless, the evolution towards this separation was by no means a foregone conclusion in the late eighteenth century. As it turned out, general-purpose computers had to be discovered twice. The wheels of industry Charles Babbage was the first person to produce an engineering design that distinguished between a program and the machine capable of executing it. For this he is rightly revered as the father of the modern computer. He did not arrive at this innovative design all at once. He spent years working on a number of different things, until he had the brilliant idea of borrowing a technological solution from the textile industry and applying it to automating solutions of general problems in mathematics.

Rummage: A History of the Things We Have Reused, Recycled and Refused To Let Go by Emily Cockayne

Cape to Cairo, carbon footprint, card file, Charles Babbage, Fellow of the Royal Society, full employment, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Morris worm, New Journalism, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, paper trading, planned obsolescence, South Sea Bubble

Frederick Oldfield Ward presented his method to the International Exhibition in 1862: union fabrics were steamed, releasing the cotton to be used for papermaking and leaving the wool charred into a powdered form called ulmate (or crenate) of ammonia. Ward was no typical recycling pioneer; he had no financial need to reuse waste. A doctor by training, and with correspondence networks including men like Charles Babbage, Ward dabbled in speculation on small patents. Rich in nitrogen, ulmate of ammonia made a good addition to manure and was especially prized by broccoli growers in Cornwall. The substance could also be used in paper-making. The Ulmate of Ammonia Company was set up next to a paper mill in Grays, Essex.

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There was room to manufacture starch on the side, and paraphernalia available for ‘rectifying HARTSHORN’. Interested parties might approach ‘A. B.’ at Mr Story’s Soap & Candle Warehouse, 57 Queen Street, Cheapside.69 Horns and hooves (plus leather-clippings, remnants of flock and dust from wool mills) were also burned to create prussiate of potash, later described by Charles Babbage as ‘that beautiful yellow crystallized salt’. This substance gave colour to calicos.70 Clara Matéaux, whose father was a dyer, later wrote about the use of distilled oil of deer horns in dye works, ‘ammonia having a peculiar effect upon vegetable colours’.71 Paper reusers Chrysal; or, The Adventures of a Guinea (Dublin, 1760) is a story fictitiously purported to have been discovered serendipitously among a pile of waste papers in a chandler’s shop, set aside for the wrapping of butter, mustard, brick-dust, small coal, tea, sugar and snuff.72 We’ve already seen that butchers, tallow chandlers, cheese-mongers and trunk-makers used wastepaper for packaging.

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The heritage of such objects is bound up with the prestige of ownership; from this, value attaches to the modes of acquisition and redistribution: thus auction houses and antique dealers are deemed facilitators of acceptable reuse, and someone homeless sifting through bins is deemed merely pitiful.19 Fashion dictates that value changes more or less arbitrarily: mauve crinolines; xylonite shirt collars; plush Wombles. The actual utility of such objects often remains unchanged; they are just less sought after and possess less cultural cachet. At that point they are cast aside for less fashionable (poorer) people to use. Charles Babbage presented this as a democratisation of the things themselves.20 The new plastic items that appeared at the end of the nineteenth century also inaugurated a form of this: Bonzoline billiard balls which looked like ivory; celluloid combs in imitation of tortoiseshell; pianos bedecked with bois durci.

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

A. Roger Ekirch, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, big-box store, British Empire, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Hans Lippershey, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, inventory management, Jacquard loom, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Live Aid, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, Murano, Venice glass, planetary scale, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, techno-determinism, the scientific method, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, walkable city, women in the workforce

Think of the coordination needs of the industrial factory: thousands of short, repetitive tasks performed in proper sequence by hundreds of individuals. A microprocessor requires the same kind of time discipline, only the units being coordinated are bits of information instead of the hands and bodies of millworkers. (When Charles Babbage first invented a programmable computer in the middle of the Victorian Age, he called the CPU “the mill” for a reason.) And instead of thousands of operations per minute, the microprocessor is executing billions of calculations per second, while shuffling information in and out of other microchips on the circuit board.

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In collaboration with another brilliant Victorian who was equally ahead of his time, Ada charted a path that allowed her to push the barriers of Victorian society without succumbing to the creative chaos that had enveloped her father. She became a software programmer. — WRITING CODE IN THE MIDDLE of the nineteenth century may seem like a vocation that would be possible only with time travel, but as chance would have it, Ada had met the one Victorian who was capable of giving her such a project: Charles Babbage, the brilliant and eclectic inventor who was in the middle of drafting plans for his visionary Analytical Engine. Babbage had spent the previous two decades concocting state-of-the-art calculators, but since the mid-1830s, he had commenced work on a project that would last the rest of his life: designing a truly programmable computer, capable of executing complex sequences of calculations that went far beyond the capabilities of any contemporary machines.

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When she told Babbage of her work, he asked why she hadn’t written her own essay on the subject. Despite all her ambition, the thought of composing her own analysis had apparently never occurred to Ada, and so at Babbage’s encouragement, she concocted her own aphoristic commentary, stitched together out of a series of extended footnotes attached to the Italian paper. Charles Babbage Those footnotes would ultimately prove to be far more valuable and influential than the original text they annotated. They contained a series of elemental instruction sets that could be used to direct the calculations of the Analytical Engine. These are now considered to be the first examples of working software ever published, though the machinery that could actually run the code wouldn’t be built for another century.

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold

Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Dennis Ritchie, digital divide, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Eratosthenes, Fairchild Semiconductor, Free Software Foundation, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, Louis Daguerre, millennium bug, Multics, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, popular electronics, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture

Macintosh is a registered trademark of Apple Computer, Inc. Microsoft, MS-DOS, and Windows are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners. Images of Charles Babbage, George Boole, Louis Braille, Herman Hollerith, Samuel Morse, and John von Neumann appear courtesy of Corbis Images and were modified for this book by Joel Panchot. The January 1975 cover of Popular Electronics is reprinted by permission of Ziff-Davis and the Ziff family. All other illustrations in the book were produced by Joel Panchot.

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But Samuel Morse had demonstrated his telegraph in 1844—ten years before the publication of Boole's The Laws of Thought—and it would be simple to substitute a telegraph sounder for the lightbulb in the circuit shown above. But nobody in the nineteenth century made the connection between the ANDs and ORs of Boolean algebra and the wiring of simple switches in series and in parallel. No mathematician, no electrician, no telegraph operator, nobody. Not even that icon of the computer revolution Charles Babbage (1792–1871), who had corresponded with Boole and knew his work, and who struggled for much of his life designing first a Difference Engine and then an Analytical Engine that a century later would be regarded as the precursors to modern computers. What might have helped Babbage, we know now, was the realization that perhaps instead of gears and levers to perform calculations, a computer might better be built out of telegraph relays.

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If you wanted to publish a new set of tables, you would hire a bunch of computers, set them to work, and then assemble all the results. Errors could creep in at any stage of this process, of course, from the initial calculation to setting up the type to print the final pages. The desire to eliminate errors from mathematical tables motivated the work of Charles Babbage (1791–1871), a British mathematician and economist who was almost an exact contemporary of Samuel Morse. At the time, mathematical tables (of logarithms, for example) were not created by calculating an actual logarithm for each and every entry in the table. This would have taken far too long.

The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy From Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography by Simon Singh

Bletchley Park, Charles Babbage, Donald Davies, friendly fire, information security, Leo Hollis, Mikhail Gorbachev, old-boy network, operational security, quantum cryptography, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, Simon Singh, Turing machine, unbiased observer, undersea cable, Zimmermann PGP

It was considered unbreakable, and became known as le chiffre indéchiffrable. Cryptographers had, for the time being at least, a clear lead over the cryptanalysts. Table 6 International Morse Code symbols. Mr. Babbage Versus the Vigenère Cipher The most intriguing figure in nineteenth-century cryptanalysis is Charles Babbage, the eccentric British genius best known for developing the blueprint for the modern computer. He was born in 1791, the son of Benjamin Babbage, a wealthy London banker. When Charles married without his father’s permission, he no longer had access to the Babbage fortune, but he still had enough money to be financially secure, and he pursued the life of a roving scholar, applying his mind to whatever problem tickled his fancy.

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In fact, the Analytical Engine provided the template for modern computers. The design included a “store” (memory) and a “mill” (processor), which would allow it to make decisions and repeat instructions, which are equivalent to the “IF … THEN …” and “LOOP” commands in modern programming. Figure 12 Charles Babbage. (photo credit 2.2) A century later, during the course of the Second World War, the first electronic incarnations of Babbage’s machine would have a profound effect on cryptanalysis, but, in his own lifetime, Babbage made an equally important contribution to codebreaking: he succeeded in breaking the Vigenère cipher, and in so doing he made the greatest breakthrough in cryptanalysis since the Arab scholars of the ninth century broke the monoalphabetic cipher by inventing frequency analysis.

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Consequently, he offered a correction to Tennyson’s “otherwise beautiful” poem: It must be manifest that if this were true, the population of the world would be at a standstill … I would suggest that in the next edition of your poem you have it read—“Every moment dies a man, Every moment 1 is born.” … The actual figure is so long I cannot get it onto a line, but I believe the figure 1 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry. I am, Sir, yours, etc., Charles Babbage. Babbage’s successful cryptanalysis of the Vigenère cipher was probably achieved in 1854, soon after his spat with Thwaites, but his discovery went completely unrecognized because he never published it. The discovery came to light only in the twentieth century, when scholars examined Babbage’s extensive notes.

The Difference Engine by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling

card file, Charles Babbage, clockwatching, Fellow of the Royal Society, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, spinning jenny, the scientific method

Can a girl do that?" Mick laughed. "Have you never heard of Lady Ada Byron, then? The Prime Minister's daughter, and the very Queen of Engines!" He let her go, and swung both his arms wide, coat swinging open, a showman's gesture. "Ada Byron, true friend and disciple of Babbage himself! Lord Charles Babbage, father of the Difference Engine and the Newton of our modern age!" She gaped at him. "But Ada Byron is a ladyship!" "You'd be surprised who our Lady Ada knows," Mick declared, plucking a block of cards from his pocket and peeling off its paper jacket. "Oh, not to drink tea with, among the diamond squad at her garden-parties, but Ada's what you'd call fast, in her own mathematical way . . . " He paused.

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He slotted the cards into a silvered tray by the side of the machine, then spun and caught her wrist. "Your father's dead, girl! 'Tis not that I mean to hurt you, saying it, but the Luddites are dead as cold ashes. Oh, we marched and ranted, for the rights of labor and such -- fine talk, girl! But Lord Charles Babbage made blueprints while we made pamphlets. And his blueprints built this world." Mick shook his head. "The Byron men, the Babbage men, the Industrial Radicals, they own Great Britain! They own us, girl -- the very globe is at their feet, Europe, America, everywhere. The House of Lords is packed top to bottom with Rads.

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She is the Queen of Engines, the Enchantress of Number. Lord Babbage called her "Little Da." She has no formal role in government, and the brief flowering of her mathematical genius is far behind her. But she is, perhaps, the foremost link between her father, the Great Orator of the Industrial Radical Party, and Charles Babbage, the Party's grey eminence and foremost social theorist. Ada is the mother. Her thoughts are closed. THIRD ITERATION Dark-Lanterns Picture Edward Mallory ascending the splendid central staircase in the Palace of Paleontology, its massive ebony railing supported by a black-enameled ironwork depicting ancient ferns, cycads, and ginkgoes.

Trees on Mars: Our Obsession With the Future by Hal Niedzviecki

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, anti-communist, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, big-box store, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, computer age, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Zinn, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, independent contractor, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Armstrong, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ponzi scheme, precariat, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Virgin Galactic, warehouse robotics, working poor

Gleick, The Information, 351. 15. Martin Davis, The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing, Turing centenary ed (Boca Raton, Fla: CRC Press, 2012), 16. 16. George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe, 1st ed (New York: Pantheon Books, 2012), 104. 17. Ibid., 105. 18. Charles Babbage, Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines: Selected Writings (Dover Publications, 1961), 247. 19. Ibid., 252. 20. Pierre-Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (Wiley, 1902). 21. Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral, 2012, 130. 22. “The Atlantic Telegraph,” The New York Times, August 6, 1858. 23.

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He spoke of using this mathematical language to “work out by an infallible calculus, the doctrines most useful for life, that is, those of morality and metaphysics.”16 Leibniz invented calculus and even, in 1679, “imagined a digital computer in which binary numbers were represented by spherical tokens, governed by gates under mechanical control.”17 He laid the groundwork for the information-based computer revolution to come. But first, there would be Charles Babbage, who never did quite manage to bend the steam technologies of nineteenth-century England into his difference engine—the massive calculating machine he believed he could build. But that didn’t stop his supporters from trumpeting what the thing would and could eventually do. In particular, Ada Lovelace, daughter of the poet Lord Byron and Babbage’s mathematically gifted muse, enthused that Babbage’s analytical engine would not just calculate numbers, it would perform operations on “any process which alters the mutual relation of two or more things.”

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A formula for a new kind of all-embracing intelligence. A language, in other words, to encompass all information, known and still to come. Everything would be converted to information, represented by symbols, the functions of the world nothing more than code, hidden, awaiting discovery and translation. Wrote Charles Babbage himself of his aspirations regarding his difference engine: “We may perhaps be enabled to form a faint estimate of the magnitude of that lowest step in the chain of reasoning, which leads us up to Nature’s God.21 Babbage works on his counting machine, and around the same time countless others compete with Samuel Morse for another way to convert what there is into information and, in the process, conquer the limitations of the physical world.

Hacking Capitalism by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

Abraham Maslow, air gap, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Debian, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, Donald Davies, Eben Moglen, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, invention of the telephone, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mitch Kapor, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, patent troll, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, profit motive, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, safety bicycle, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Whole Earth Catalog, Yochai Benkler

A common thread runs through the perforated cards devised by Joseph-Marie Jacquard to deprive weavers of their craft skills, and the writings of Charles Babbage, the distinguished forerunner of modern computer science. He envisioned the world’s first computer, the Difference Engine, and incorporated Jacquard’s punched card system in his second attempt to build a computer, the Analytical Engine. These machines were intended to replace the personnel, at the time known as ‘computers’, who were then employed to calculate mathematical tables. In addition to figuring out the principles of computing, Charles Babbage was also a pioneer in writing management literature. In On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, published in 1832, he advised factory owners how to break up the labour process into simple tasks that could be operated by workers with the least possible skills.

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In On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, published in 1832, he advised factory owners how to break up the labour process into simple tasks that could be operated by workers with the least possible skills. His deep understanding of technology did not fail him when assessing the expediency of machinery on the factory shop-floor: “One great advantage which we may derive from machinery is from the check which it affords against the inattention, the idleness, or the dishonesty of human agents.”9 Charles Babbage’s words inadvertently point to the antagonistic relation between labour and capital that computing has grown out of. The computer makes the ‘machinery check’ against human agents surgical in its precision. Furthermore, software-mediated machinery checks are now being exported from the factory to the whole of society.

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Karl Marx made a well-known allegory between class struggle and the mole. It disappears beneath the earth for long periods of time only to reappear again at an unexpected time and place. Capital’s strategy to subdue labour conflicts with the help of computers has merely resulted in the mole respawning on the Internet. Charles Babbage’s endorsement of machinery as an instrument of control is diametrically opposed to how a hacker from the Hacksec group assesses the great advantage which we may derive from technology: “So that is the spirit, to be able to take these components, to put together the technology that was the domain of governments and let the average person figure out how to use it.

Turing's Vision: The Birth of Computer Science by Chris Bernhardt

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Conway's Game of Life, discrete time, Douglas Hofstadter, Georg Cantor, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Internet Archive, Jacquard loom, John Conway, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, Norbert Wiener, Paul Erdős, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture

We will look at some of these ideas in the next chapter. 5 Other Systems for Computation “We may say most aptly, that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.” Ada Lovelace In 1823, with substantial funding from the British government, Charles Babbage began the construction of his first “Difference Engine.” The mathematical tables of the time contained many errors that were caused by human computers. Babbage’s Difference Engine was to be a mechanical calculator. It would provide a quicker, cheaper, and more accurate way of generating these tables.

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There were different versions of this machine. Two versions have been constructed from Babbage’s designs. One is on display at the London Science Museum. The other is owned by Nathan Myhrvold and is currently on display at the Computer History Museum in California. 2. Sketch of The Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage By L. F. MENABREA of Turin, Officer of the Military Engineers With notes upon the Memoir by the Translator ADA AUGUSTA, COUNTESS OF LOVELACE. 3. David Deutsch. The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World. 4. This appears in the introduction to Alan Turing’s Systems of Logic: The Princeton Thesis.

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The Life of Abraham Lincoln, reprinted by Forgotten Books, 2008. [30] McCulloch, Warren S; Pitts, Walter H. “A Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity,” Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics, Vol. 5, 1943, pp. 115–133. [31] Menabrea, Luigi; Lovelace, Ada. Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage By L. F. MENABREA of Turin, Officer of the Military Engineers With Notes upon the Memoir by the Translator ADA AUGUSTA, COUNTESS OF LOVELACE Scientific Memoirs, Vol 3 (1842). [32] Minsky, Marvin. Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines, Prentice-Hall, 1967. [33] Minsky, Marvin; Papert, Seymour.

Artificial Whiteness by Yarden Katz

affirmative action, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, general purpose technology, gentrification, Hans Moravec, housing crisis, income inequality, information retrieval, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, rent control, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, talking drums, telemarketer, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Seymour Papert, “The Summer Vision Project,” Vision Memo No. 100, MIT Artificial Intelligence Group, July 1966.   14.   Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener—Father of Cybernetics (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 321.   15.   Patrick H. Winston, oral history interview, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, 1990, 19.   16.   Conway and Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age, 321.   17.   A. Müller and K. H. Müller, eds., An Unfinished Revolution? Heinz Von Foerster and the Biological Computer Laboratory, BCL, 1958–1976, Complexity, Design, Society (Vienna: Edition Echoraum, 2007), 60–61.   18.   

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For discussion of the notion of “freedom” promised by Licklider and other figures in the software world, see Wendy H. K. Chun, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), chap. 2.   11.   In an interview in 1988, Licklider described his efforts to pitch new approaches to “command and control” to the CIA and NSA. See Licklider’s oral history interview, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, 1988, 35–40. With his training as a psychologist, Licklider also oversaw ARPA’s Behavioral Sciences Program, which participated in a counterinsurgency research effort in Thailand in the 1960s. ARPA established a research center in Bangkok that collected anthropometric data about local populations and sought to develop ways to suppress potential counterinsurgencies, not just in Thailand but around the world.

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“How to Make A.I. Human-Friendly.” New York Times, March 8, 2018. Li, Fei-Fei, Rob Fergus, and Pietro Perona. “One-Shot Learning of Object Categories.” IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 28, no. 4 (2006): 594–611. Licklider, Joseph C. R. Oral history interview. Minneapolis: Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, 1988. Licklider, Joseph C. R., and Robert W Taylor. “The Computer as a Communication Device.” Science and Technology 76, no. 2 (1968): 1–3. Lighthill, James. A Report on Artificial Intelligence. London: UK Science and Engineering Research Council, 1973. Lin, Tsung-Yi, Michael Maire, Serge Belongie, James Hays, Pietro Perona, Deva Ramanan, Piotr Dollár, and C.

Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb

Abraham Wald, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Air France Flight 447, Airbus A320, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Black Swan, blockchain, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial engineering, fulfillment center, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, high net worth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, information retrieval, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Bostrom, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, profit maximization, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Levy, strong AI, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tim Cook: Apple, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

The advent and commercialization of computers made arithmetic cheap.5 When arithmetic became cheap, not only did we use more of it for traditional applications of arithmetic, but we also used the newly cheap arithmetic for applications that were not traditionally associated with arithmetic, like music. Heralded as the first computer programmer, Ada Lovelace was the first to see this potential. Working under very expensive light in the early 1800s, she wrote the earliest recorded program to compute a series of numbers (called Bernoulli numbers) on a still-theoretical computer that Charles Babbage designed. Babbage was also an economist, and as we will see in this book, that was not the only time economics and computer science intersected. Lovelace understood that arithmetic could, to use modern startup lingo, “scale” and enable so much more. She realized that applications of computers were not limited to mathematical operations: “Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity.”6 No computer had been invented yet, but Lovelace saw that an arithmetic machine could store and replay music—a form that defined art and humanity.

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The result was an accuracy of 99.5 percent.20 That is, the human error rate of 3.4 percent fell to just 0.5 percent. Errors fell by 85 percent. This is a classic division of labor, but not physically as Adam Smith described. Rather, it is a cognitive division of labor that economist and computer pioneer Charles Babbage initially described in the nineteenth century: “the effect of the division of labour, both in mechanical and mental processes, is, that it enables us to purchase and apply precisely the quantity of skill and knowledge which is required for it.”21 The human and the machine are good at different aspects of prediction.

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Why bother spending money when security doesn’t reduce robberies? Tim Harford, The Undercover Economist Strikes Back: How to Run—or Ruin—an Economy (New York: Riverhead Books, 2014). 20. Dayong Wang et al., “Deep Learning for Identifying Metastatic Breast Cancer,” Camelyon Grand Challenge, June 18, 2016, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.05718.pdf. 21. Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (London: Charles Knight Pall Mall East, 1832), 162. 22. Daniel Paravisini and Antoinette Schoar, “The Incentive Effect of IT: Randomized Evidence from Credit Committees,” working paper 19303, National Bureau of Economic Research, August 2013. 23.

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

At the same time, he believed her to be more gifted and able than any pupil (read boys) he had taught, and said in a letter to her mother that Ada could become ‘an original mathematical investigator, perhaps of first-rate eminence’. Poor Ada. Told to study maths to avoid going poetically mad. Then told she was at risk of going mathematically mad. None of this mattered to Ada, who seems to have known her own mind from her early years. At 17 she was invited to a party at 1 Dorset Street, London. The home of Charles Babbage. * * * Babbage was independently wealthy, clever, eccentric, and had persuaded the British Government to grant him £17,000 (about £1.7 million now) to build what he called his Difference Engine: a crank-handled adding machine designed to calculate and print the logarithmic tables used by engineers, sailors, accountants, machine builders – anybody who wanted to do the calculations speedily by using pre-printed tables.

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She was freakishly lucky to have been given a maths tutor, and blessed to find that she had an intuitive understanding of numbers, as well as the necessary application for long hours of solitary study, at a time when women of her class and kind were encouraged to be frivolous man-pleasers – at least until they lost their looks, at which point they could devote themselves to charitable causes. The probability of there being such a person as Ada Byron, later Countess of Lovelace, is vanishingly small. But there she is, in history just at the right time to meet Charles Babbage, and to design the first software programme for the first (never built) computer. * * * It all starts with a ground-breaking paper Ada wrote – without actually realising she had written it, because back in the day women didn’t write scientific papers. It happened like this … Babbage had gone to Turin in 1840 to give a lecture on his Analytical Engine.

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Love(lace) Actually Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, 1818 Frankissstein: A Love Story, Jeanette Winterson, 2019 The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer, Sydney Padua, 2015 (NOTE: FUCKING GREAT!) Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage, Esq … with notes by the translator, L. F. Menabrea, 1842. Extracted from the ‘Scientific Memoirs’ [The translator’s notes signed: A.L.L. i.e. Augusta Ada King, Countess Lovelace.] Byron: Life and Legend, Fiona MacCarthy, 2002 Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and her Daughter Mary Shelley, Charlotte Gordon, 2015 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1792 Rights of Man, Thomas Paine, 1791 The United States Declaration of Independence, 1776 The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1762 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness, William Godwin, 1793 Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons, 1932 Hidden Figures (movie), directed by Theodore Melfi, 2016 ‘The Women of ENIAC’ (essay), IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 1996 (Interviewing 10 of the women who worked with the computer during its 10-year run) The Creativity Code: Art and Innovation in the Age of AI, Marcus du Sautoy, 2019 Howards End, E.

Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology by Howard Rheingold

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Bletchley Park, card file, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Hacker Ethic, heat death of the universe, Howard Rheingold, human-factors engineering, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pattern recognition, popular electronics, post-industrial society, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The Home Computer Revolution, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture

Perhaps as an occupational hazard of this dangerously self-reflective enterprise, or as a result of being extraordinary people in restrictive social environments, the personalities of these patriarchs (and matriarchs) of computation reveal a common streak of eccentricity, ranging from the mildly unorthodox to the downright strange. Charles Babbage and Ada, Countess of Lovelace, lived in the London of Dickens and Prince Albert (and knew them both). A hundred years before some of the best minds in the world used the resources of a nation to build a digital computer, these two eccentric inventor-mathematicians dreamed of building their "Analytical Engine."

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She was a teenager with long dark hair, a talent for mathematics, and a weakness for wagering on horse races. When she took a close look at the device and realized what this older gentleman was trying to do, she surprised them all by joining him in an enterprise that might have altered history, had they succeeded. Charles Babbage and his accomplice, Lady Lovelace, came very close to inventing the computer more than a century before American engineers produced ENIAC. The story of the "Analytical Engine" is a tale of two extraordinarily gifted and ill-fated British eccentrics whose biographies might have been fabrications of Babbage's friend Charles Dickens, if Dickens had been a science-fiction writer.

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Ada exhibited her mathematical talents early in life. One of her family's closest friends was Augustus De Morgan, the famous British Logician. She was well tutored, but always seemed to thirst for more knowledge than her tutors could provide. Ada actively sought the perfect mentor, whom she thought she found in a contemporary of her mother's--Charles Babbage. Mrs. De Morgan was present at the historic occasion when the young Ada Byron was first shown a working model of the Difference Engine, during a demonstration Babbage held for Lady Byron's friends. In her memoirs, Mrs. De Morgan remembered the effect the contraption had on Augusta Ada: "While the rest of the party gazed at this beautiful invention with the same sort of expression and feeling that some savages are said to have shown on first seeing a looking glass or hearing a gun, Miss Byron, young as she was, understood its working and saw the great beauty of the invention."

Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents by Lisa Gitelman

Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, Charles Babbage, computer age, corporate governance, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, national security letter, Neal Stephenson, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, optical character recognition, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Turing test, WikiLeaks, Works Progress Administration

That ink—whether applied by a specialized ruling machine (figure 1.1) or printed on a printing press—was paradoxically what made most blanks blank. Each type of blank was designed and manufactured for its own purpose, like a primitive information technology, Martin Campbell-­Kelly has suggested, suited to the organization and control of knowledge according to what Charles Babbage—writing in 1835—called “the division of mental labor.”4 Though the A S H O R T H I S TO RY O F ________ 23 first blanks were ancient or medieval documents rather than modern ones, and thus predate printing (think, for example, of papal indulgences5), the nineteenth century witnessed a proliferation of preprinted blank forms.

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Willis (in Voices from the Press) and Lucy Larcom (in Poets and Poetry of Printerdom) in these volumes of occasional writings by printers: they weren’t printers, but they were close enough.89 Highly variable though it was, the distance between printing and authoring was definite and distinct, a bright line by dint of the fact that authors of necessity wrote everything in longhand. In short, authors only penned while only printers printed. Edgar Allan Poe, for one, felt this handicap keenly and dabbled in ways to reproduce text without printing.90 Charles Babbage too chafed mightily at the necessity of dealing with printers and publisher-­ booksellers.91 Not until typewriters became common toward the end of the century would writers finally be able to produce copy that, because typed, looked almost printed. Reproducing that typed copy would remain the printer’s domain into the next century. 50 CHAPTER ONE The look of printedness meant something to Poe, Babbage, Harpel, and their contemporaries, though the eventual erosion of the printers’ monopoly has made its meanings difficult to discern in retrospect.

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In this account of circulation, mobility, and inertia, I have been influenced by N OT E S TO C H A P T E R O N E 157 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 158 the work of Will Straw (see, for example, “Embedded Memories,” in Residual Media, ed. Charles R. Acland [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007], 3–31). Conversations with Michael Winship helped clarify this account of repetition. Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, 4th ed. (London: Charles Knight, 1835), 191; see Martin Campbell-­Kelly, “Informational Technology and Organizational Change in the British Census, 1801–1911,” Information Systems Research 7 (March 1996): 22–36. In chapter 2 of The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (New York: Zone, 2012), Ben Kafka explains how Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès worked this principle out in advance of Babbage as a theory of government.

Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Abraham Wald, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, dark matter, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, Ford Model T, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, IFF: identification friend or foe, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, planetary scale, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, SETI@home, social graph, speech recognition, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture

Thanks to Neal, and many other supporters, especially those individuals and institutions who allowed me into their basements, I spent an inordinate amount of time, over the past eight years, immersed in the layers of documents that were deposited when the digital universe was taking form. From Alex Magoun at RCA to Willis Ware at RAND, and many other keepers of institutional memory in between—including the Annals of the History of Computing and the Charles Babbage Institute’s oral history collection—I am indebted to those who saved records that otherwise might not have been preserved. To a long list of historians and biographers—including William Aspray, Armand Borel, Alice Burks, Flo Conway, Jack Copeland, James Cortada, Martin Davis, Peter Galison, David Alan Grier, Rolf Herken, Andrew Hodges, Norman Macrae, Brian Randell, and Jim Siegelman—I owe more than is acknowledged here.

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68 EIGHT V-40 Far as all such engines must ever be placed at an immeasurable interval below the simplest of Nature’s works, yet, from the vastness of those cycles which even human contrivance in some cases unfolds to our view, we may perhaps be enabled to form a faint estimate of the magnitude of that lowest step in the chain of reasoning, which leads us up to Nature’s God. —Charles Babbage, 1837 PENTAERYTHRITOL TETRANITRATE (PETN) was an important high explosive in World War I, yet its molecular structure remained unknown in World War II. Andrew Booth, whose father invented, among other things, the automotive ignition advance and a stovetop thermocouple designed to power a radio in a household without electricity, was a graduate student at Birmingham University when he was assigned the job of using X-ray crystallography to find this out.

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“And he said, ‘What do you want to do?’ I was quite clear by then, and I said, ‘Well the only group that is worth talking to is the lot at Princeton.’ They were the only people who had really got themselves out of the business of just waving their hands in the air and doing nothing.”4 Familiar with both the Analytical Engine of Charles Babbage and with Turing’s Universal Machine, Booth saw the IAS project as the practical implementation of these ideas. Booth, who knew Turing from Cambridge, was later asked by the National Research Council to review some of the circuits Turing had designed for the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) being built at the National Physical Laboratory in London.

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Brian Merchant

Airbnb, animal electricity, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Black Lives Matter, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, deep learning, DeepMind, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Higgs boson, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, information security, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, John Gruber, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Large Hadron Collider, Lyft, M-Pesa, MITM: man-in-the-middle, more computing power than Apollo, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, pattern recognition, peak oil, pirate software, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, TSMC, Turing test, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, zero day

A former church abbey tucked in the middle of Paris’s third arrondissement, it’s at once sprawling and unassuming. A mold of the Statue of Liberty greets visitors in the stone courtyard. You’ll find some of the most important precursors to the modern computer here, from Pascal’s calculator (the first automatic calculator) to the Jacquard loom (which inspired Charles Babbage to automate his Analytical Engine). And you’ll find the pendulum. Jean-Bernard-Léon Foucault—not to be confused with the more strictly philosophical Foucault, Michel—had set out to prove that the Earth rotated on its axis. In 1851, he suspended a bob and a wire from the ceiling of the Paris Observatory to show that the free-swinging pendulum would slowly change direction over the course of the day, thus demonstrating what we now call the Coriolis effect.

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He was drawn to the dawning study of artificial intelligence, and when his professor asked him to pick a topic to tackle, he gravitated to one in particular: speech recognition. “I chose that particular one because I was both interested in languages, having come from India at that time, and in having had to learn three or four languages,” he said in a 1991 interview for the Charles Babbage Institute. “Speech is something that is ubiquitous to humankind.… What I didn’t know was that it was going to be a lifetime problem. I thought it was a class project.” Over the next few years, he tried to build a system for isolated word recognition—a computer that could understand the words humans spoke to it.

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But from the seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth, when these computers helped the military calculate weapons trajectories or NASA map out flight plans, the term computers described working people. And not only laborers, but laborers who were mostly invisible, working to benefit a man or institution that would ultimately obscure their participation. In fact, the actual origin of computing as we know it today probably begins not with the likes of Charles Babbage or Alan Turing or Steve Jobs but with a French astronomer, Alexis Clairaut, who was trying to solve the three-body problem. So he enlisted two fellow astronomers to help him carry out the calculations, thus dividing up labor to more efficiently compute his equations. Two centuries later, six women computers programmed the ENIAC, one of the first bona fide computing machines, but they were not invited to its public unveiling at the University of Pennsylvania nor mentioned at the event.

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex by Yasha Levine

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Californian Ideology, call centre, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, collaborative editing, colonial rule, company town, computer age, computerized markets, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, fault tolerance, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global village, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Greyball, Hacker Conference 1984, Howard Zinn, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, life extension, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, private military company, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Hackers Conference, Tony Fadell, uber lyft, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

Licklider, “Memorandum for Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network.” 56. Waldrop, Dream Machine, 254, 305. 57. An Interview with Lawrence G. Roberts, Conducted by Arthur L. Norberg (San Mateo, CA: Charles Babbage Institute, April 1989), https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/107608/oh159lgr.pdf. 58. Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 48. 59. Abbate, Inventing the Internet, 48. 60. An Interview with Keith Uncapher, Conducted by Arthur L. Norberg (Minneapolis, MN: Charles Babbage Institute, July 1989), https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/107692/oh174ku.pdf. 61. The smart money was on Raytheon, a major military contractor with deep ties to MIT going back to World War II.

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Barber Associates, Advanced Research Projects Agency. 32. Waldrop, Dream Machine, 203. 33. J. C. R. Licklider, “Man-Computer Symbiosis.” 34. Richard J. Barber Associates, Advanced Research Projects Agency. 35. An Interview with J. C. R. Licklider Conducted by William Aspray and Arthur Norberg (Cambridge, MA: Charles Babbage Institute, October 28, 1988), https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/107436/oh150jcl.pdf. 36. “The objective of this program is to identify and solve problems that arise when a number of digital computers, some of them remote from others, are operated together in a network, and when the information-processing capabilities of a network of computers are distributed among several or many users operating at consoles, some of which are remote from the computers.”

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And, of course, none of them used the ARPANET or any other network because it did not yet exist. 65. Abbate, Inventing the Internet, 127–128. 66. Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn, “A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection,” IEEE Transactions on Communications 22, no. 5 (May 1974). 67. Vinton Cerf, interviewed by Judy O’Neill, April 24, 1990, Charles Babbage Institute. 68. Ibid. 69. “Department of Defense Appropriations for Fiscal Year 1978, Part 5—Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation,” 95th Cong., 1st sess. (February 4, 1977–March 18, 1977). 70. For example: in 1973, even as Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf sketched out the ARPANET 2.0, ARPA director Stephen Lukasik was asking Congress for $6.5 million to fund an “intelligent systems” program to fulfill the “objective of developing the capability to have computers consider large quantities of complex, real world information and form generalizations and plans based on the totality of information.

Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer by Michael Swaine, Paul Freiberger

1960s counterculture, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, commoditize, Computer Lib, computer vision, Dennis Ritchie, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Fairchild Semiconductor, Gary Kildall, gentleman farmer, Google Chrome, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Tim Cook: Apple, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, world market for maybe five computers

Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM The personal computer sprang to life in the mid-1970s, but its historical roots reach back to the giant electronic brains of the 1950s, and well before that to the thinking machines of 19th-century fiction. Steam I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam. –Charles Babbage, 19th-century inventor Intrigued by the changes being wrought by science, the poets Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley idled away one rainy summer day in Switzerland discussing artificial life and artificial thought, wondering whether “the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.”

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It was then that the steam engine was first mounted on wheels, and by 1825 the first public railway was in operation. Steam power held the same sort of mystique that electricity and atomic power would have in later generations. The Steampunk Computer In 1833, when British mathematician, astronomer, and inventor Charles Babbage spoke of executing calculations by steam and then actually designed machines that he claimed could mechanize calculation, even mechanize thought, many saw him as a real-life Dr. Frankenstein. Although he never implemented his designs, Babbage was no idle dreamer; he worked on what he called his Analytical Engine, drawing on the most advanced thinking in logic and mathematics, until his death in 1871.

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Although he never implemented his designs, Babbage was no idle dreamer; he worked on what he called his Analytical Engine, drawing on the most advanced thinking in logic and mathematics, until his death in 1871. Babbage intended that the machine would free people from repetitive and boring mental tasks, just as the new machines of that era were freeing people from physical drudgery. * * * Figure 1. Charles Babbage The 19th-century mathematician and inventor designed a machine to “mechanize thought” 100 years before the first computers were successfully built. (Courtesy of The Computer Museum History Center, San Jose) Babbage’s colleague, patroness, and scientific chronicler was Augusta Ada Byron, daughter of Lord Byron, pupil of algebraist Augustus De Morgan, and the future Lady Lovelace.

Piracy : The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates by Adrian Johns

active measures, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, commoditize, Computer Lib, Corn Laws, demand response, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, full employment, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, pirate software, radical decentralization, Republic of Letters, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, software patent, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, The Home Computer Revolution, the scientific method, traveling salesman, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog

Another android drew pictures (“the various motions of the eyes, arms, and hand imitate nature exactly”). An exapprentice of the JacquetDroz named Maillardet subsequently built a career in London on machines that seemed to act with “life and reason.” According to David Brewster they were “very common” there a generation later, when Charles Babbage certainly witnessed them. To announce such a creature, Brewster opined – thinking of the most notorious of all, the chessplaying Turk – was tantamount to projecting “a mechanical counsellor of state.” That automata and androids exerted such a fascination is now rather well known. But the Microcosm gave solid form to the challenge that they presented to accounts of creative authorship in particular.

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One lasting consequence of the assault he mounted was to be the creation and preservation of a mass of facts – the “novel antiquities,” as it were, of publishing itself. Archived in Westminster during the parliamentary inquiries Brydges provoked, they were quietly stored away for years, until the information pioneer Charles Babbage rediscovered them. For at least the next century these archived facts would then be dusted off and reexposed to view, informing a series of challenges that would define many of the terms of modern intellectual property debates. In Brydges’s own eyes, the publishing industry that was coalescing around the copyright principle was a monstrous mechanism for the triumph of commerce over true genius.

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Moreover, many of his antagonists’ arguments were in fact no less outlandish than his own. After all, it was the defenders of copyright who resurrected Corsellis and proclaimed a pre1710 right of universal piracy. And the factual relics of his campaign would survive it to be revived by later critics of publishing monopolies, starting with Charles Babbage. But there is more to be said than that. The outlandish character of Brydges’s campaigns was in fact a central element in them. His understanding of his own nature was forged in the late 1780s and 1790s through the Chandos campaign and his early attempts at novel writing. What lasted from those years was a conviction that he was essentially (whatever his outward appearance) aristocratic, sensitive, secluded, poetic, and temperamental.

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control by Stuart Russell

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Goodhart's law, Hans Moravec, ImageNet competition, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, luminiferous ether, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, OpenAI, openstreetmap, P = NP, paperclip maximiser, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, positional goods, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Thales of Miletus, The Future of Employment, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Bayes, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transport as a service, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, zero-sum game

Although it could only add and subtract and was used mainly in his father’s tax-collecting office, it led Pascal to write, “The arithmetical machine produces effects which appear nearer to thought than all the actions of animals.” Technology took a dramatic leap forward in the nineteenth century when the British mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage designed the Analytical Engine, a programmable universal machine in the sense defined later by Turing. He was helped in his work by Ada, Countess of Lovelace, daughter of the romantic poet and adventurer Lord Byron. Whereas Babbage hoped to use the Analytical Engine to compute accurate mathematical and astronomical tables, Lovelace understood its true potential,41 describing it in 1842 as “a thinking or . . . a reasoning machine” that could reason about “all subjects in the universe.”

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Their species has essentially no future beyond that which we deign to allow. We do not want to be in a similar situation vis-à-vis superintelligent machines. I’ll call this the gorilla problem—specifically, the problem of whether humans can maintain their supremacy and autonomy in a world that includes machines with substantially greater intelligence. Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, who designed and wrote programs for the Analytical Engine in 1842, were aware of its potential but seemed to have no qualms about it.1 In 1847, however, Richard Thornton, editor of the Primitive Expounder, a religious journal, railed against mechanical calculators:2 Mind . . . outruns itself and does away with the necessity of its own existence by inventing machines to do its own thinking. . . .

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After almost fifty years of research, however, nearly all mathematicians and computer scientists are convinced the claim is true. 41. Lovelace’s writings on computation appear mainly in her notes attached to her translation of an Italian engineer’s commentary on Babbage’s engine: L. F. Menabrea, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage,” trans. Ada, Countess of Lovelace, in Scientific Memoirs, vol. III, ed. R. Taylor (R. and J. E. Taylor, 1843). Menabrea’s original article, written in French and based on lectures given by Babbage in 1840, appears in Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève 82 (1842). 42. One of the seminal early papers on the possibility of artificial intelligence: Alan Turing, “Computing machinery and intelligence,” Mind 59 (1950): 433–60. 43.

The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal by M. Mitchell Waldrop

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apple II, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Ritchie, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, functional programming, Gary Kildall, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Leonard Kleinrock, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Multics, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, The Soul of a New Machine, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture, Wiener process, zero-sum game

Alexander, Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the FIrst Personal Computer (New York: William Morrow, 1988), 200. 18. Ibid., 228. 19. Ibid., 229. 20. Hiltzik, Dealers of LIghtnIng, 369. 21. Ibid., 359. BIBLIOGRAPHY ORAL HISTORIES FROM THE CHARLES BABBAGE INSTITUTE A pnceless resource for any historian of computing IS the collection of oral history interviews gathered over the past two decades by the University of Minnesota's Charles Babbage Institute, a center de- voted to the history of Information processing. The memones recounted in these conversations are what makes history come alIve. The CBl's oral histories may be ordered through Its Web site at http://www.cbl.umn.edu/.

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Like Bush and most of the other computer pioneers, Aiken had been intensely frustrated by the massive, mind-numbing calculations re- quired to solve so many of the most worthwhile problems in mathematics, and had been driven to find a way to automate those calculations. Unlike most of the oth- ers, however, Aiken was familiar with the work of the nineteenth-century English inventor Charles Babbage, who had designed a series of computational devices that culminated in the 1830s with his "Analytical Engine," a general-purpose, program- mable calculator that could automatically carry out arithmetic operations specified on a series of punched cards-and that could indeed make some decisions about what operation to do next.

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Nonetheless, his patroness Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace (and daughter of Lord Byron), wrote a number of programs for the machine to demonstrate its potential power. Moreover, Babbage's surviving designs show that his Analytical Engine would indeed have worked; today, Ada Lovelace is widely honored as the first programmer, and Charles Babbage is like- wise revered as the spiritual father of modern computing. It is certainly true that Howard Aiken, who had come across Babbage's biography in the mid-1930s, when almost no one in the United States had ever heard of him, considered himselfBab- bage's spiritual heir. Aiken began design work on his automatic calculating machine in 1937, when he was thirty-seven (he had worked for more than ten years as an electrical engi- neer at Westinghouse before going back to school to get a doctorate in physics).

Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else by Jordan Ellenberg

Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, autonomous vehicles, British Empire, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, East Village, Edmond Halley, Edward Jenner, Elliott wave, Erdős number, facts on the ground, Fellow of the Royal Society, Geoffrey Hinton, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, government statistician, GPT-3, greed is good, Henri Poincaré, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John Nash: game theory, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Bachelier, machine translation, Mercator projection, Mercator projection distort size, especially Greenland and Africa, Milgram experiment, multi-armed bandit, Nate Silver, OpenAI, Paul Erdős, pets.com, pez dispenser, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, side hustle, Snapchat, social distancing, social graph, transcontinental railway, urban renewal

The world largely agreed with his assessment; the so-called Vigenère cipher became widely known as le chiffre indechiffrable, the undecodable code. No reliable way to unravel the Vigenère existed until the development of the “Kasiski examination,” which, as Stigler might have predicted, was actually invented two decades before Friedrich Kasiski by Charles Babbage. But even that method doesn’t work well if the key is something as long as Tender Buttons, by Gertrude Stein. COMPLETE VICTORY A code, of course, is only as good as the work ethic of the people who deploy it. For instance: you probably know that the Confederacy was a rebellious splinter nation that waged war against the United States of America in a desperate effort to preserve a monstrous system of mass enslavement, but were you aware they were also really terrible at cryptography?

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In 1912, the Spanish mathematician Leonardo Torres y Quevedo built a machine, El Ajedrecista, to play out certain chess endgames, and Alan Turing laid out the plan for a functional chess computer in the 1950s. The idea of a chess-playing robot is even older, dating back to Wolfgang von Kempelen’s “Chess Turk,” a wildly popular chess-playing automaton of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which inspired Charles Babbage, baffled Edgar Allan Poe, and checkmated Napoleon, but which was in fact controlled by a diminutive human operator concealed inside the works. The first computer program that played Go didn’t come until the late 1960s, when Albert Zobrist wrote one as part of his University of Wisconsin PhD thesis in computer science.

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To get better approximations, you might want differences of differences of differences, or differences of those triple differences, and so on until your head spins. You wouldn’t want to do this by hand. You might even want some kind of mechanical engine to compute these differences in your stead. That brings us to Charles Babbage. Babbage had been fascinated by automata ever since his childhood, when a “a man who called himself Merlin”* allowed Babbage entry to his private workshop and showed the boy his most ingenious mechanical creation: “an admirable danseuse, with a bird on the fore finger of her right hand, which wagged its tail, flapped its wings, and opened its beak.

When Things Start to Think by Neil A. Gershenfeld

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Bretton Woods, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, disinformation, Dynabook, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, information security, invention of movable type, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, low earth orbit, means of production, new economy, Nick Leeson, packet switching, RFID, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, the medium is the message, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, world market for maybe five computers

The base of the machine was larger than it appeared; there was room for a small (but very able) chess player to squeeze in and operate the machine. While the Turk might have been a fake, the motivation behind it was genuine. A more credible attempt to build an intelligent machine was made by Charles Babbage, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge from 1828 to 1839. This is the seat that was held by Sir Isaac Newton, and is now occupied by Stephen Hawking. Just in case there was any doubt about his credentials, his full title was "Charles Babbage, Esq., M.A., F.R.S., F.R.S.E., F.R.A.S., F. Stat. S., Hon. M.R.I.A., M.C.P.S., Commander of the Italian Order of St. Maurice and St. Lazarus, Inst. Imp. (Acad. Moral.)

How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets by Andy Kessler

Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, animal electricity, automated trading system, bank run, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Bretton Woods, British Empire, buttonwood tree, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Corn Laws, cotton gin, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Fairchild Semiconductor, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, GPS: selective availability, Grace Hopper, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Multics, packet switching, pneumatic tube, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, proprietary trading, railway mania, RAND corporation, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, systems thinking, three-martini lunch, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, UUNET, Wayback Machine, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Newton stated that if an object, hot or cold, is in an area of constant temperature, then its rate of temperature change is proportional to the difference between the object’s temperature and the ambient temperature. Newton figured this out empirically with a thermometer. Watt ran experiments to figure out how fast steam would cool. In 1822, a flamboyant professor in England, Charles Babbage announced that he would build a Difference Engine. The size of a house, it would need a steam engine to operate but it would solve differential equations. Great idea, poor execution. A few small-scale models were demonstrated, but the engine was ahead of its time, by probably 100 years. After 10 years of trying, he gave up.

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Joint stock companies were the rage, and the stock market was all too happy to step in and provide capital. And more capital. And then too much capital. TRANSPORTATION ELASTICITY 49 By the 1840’s, a “Railroad Mania” was raging, with stocks selling on multiples of passenger miles, a precursor for multiples of page views that Yahoo stock would trade on 150 years later. An inventor named Charles Babbage complained that “the railroad mania withdrew from other pursuits the most intellectual and skilful draftsmen.” He sought to invent a machine that might replace them, and although he couldn’t have foreseen it, make Yahoo possible. This is when Charles Dickens marveled at railroad wealth. Investors made money, investors lost money, but in the best and worst of times, the railroads got built, and people and goods were shuffled about.

Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future: The Ingenious Ideas That Drive Today's Computers by John MacCormick, Chris Bishop

Ada Lovelace, AltaVista, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, fault tolerance, information retrieval, Menlo Park, PageRank, pattern recognition, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush

The excerpt from the conference's funding proposal (on page 103) is quoted in Pamela McCorduck's 1979 book, Machines Who Think. Compression (chapter 7). The story about Fano, Shannon, and the discovery of Huffman coding is taken from a 1989 interview of Fano by Arthur Norberg. The interview is available from the oral history archive of the Charles Babbage Institute. My favorite treatment of data compression is in Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms, by David MacKay, but this book requires college-level math. Dewdney's book (see above) contains a much briefer and more accessible discussion. Databases (chapter 8). There is an over-abundance of books providing an introduction to databases for beginners, but they typically explain how to use databases, rather than explaining how databases work—which was the objective of this chapter.

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See also certification authority authority trick B-tree Babylonia backup bank; account number; balance; for keys; online banking; for signatures; transfer; as trusted third party base, in exponentiation Battelle, John Bell Telephone Company binary Bing biology biometric sensor Bishop, Christopher bit block cipher body, of a web page brain Brin, Sergey British government browser brute force bug Burrows, Mike Bush, Vannevar Businessweek Byzantine fault tolerance C++ programming language CA. See certification authority calculus Caltech Cambridge CanCrash.exe CanCrashWeird.exe Carnegie Mellon University CD cell phone. See phone certificate certification authority Charles Babbage Institute chat-bot checkbook checksum; in practice; simple; staircase. See also cryptographic hash function checksum trick chemistry chess Church, Alonzo Church-Turing thesis citations class classification classifier clock arithmetic clock size; conditions on; factorization of; need for large; primary; as a public number; in RSA; secondary Codd, E.

The Nature of Technology by W. Brian Arthur

Andrew Wiles, Boeing 747, business process, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, computer age, creative destruction, double helix, endogenous growth, financial engineering, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, haute cuisine, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, locking in a profit, Mars Rover, means of production, Myron Scholes, power law, punch-card reader, railway mania, Recombinant DNA, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, Stuart Kauffman, technological determinism, technological singularity, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

Early radio was limited mainly to wireless telegraphy—sending messages without telegraph wires, often from ship to shore. Nevertheless, the appearance of a new domain constitutes not what can be done but, more than this, the potential of what can be done. And it stimulates the minds of the technologists of the day. In 1821 Charles Babbage and his friend, the astronomer John Herschel, were preparing mathematical tables for the Astronomical Society. The two men were comparing two previous versions of the same mathematical tables, each hand-calculated separately, and Babbage became exasperated at the high frequency of errors they were finding.

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Chapter 4: Domains, or Worlds Entered for What Can Be Accomplished There 70 A domain will… cluster: Of course, domains suffer the usual problems of collective nouns. (Who exactly is a conservative? What exactly constitutes renaissance architecture?) Domains may also overlap. Roller bearings belong to several commonly used domains. 72 Fly-by-wire allowed aircraft control systems: Tomayko. 74 In 1821 Charles Babbage: Joel Shurkin, Engines of the Mind, Norton, New York, 1996, p. 42; Doron Swade, The Difference Engine, Penguin Books, New York, 2002, p. 10. 74 Jules Verne’s: Dover’s 1962 edition of Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon carries many of the original 1860s French illustrations. 77 “the grammar of painting”: Henry James, “The Art of Fiction,” Longman’s Magazine 4, September 1884. 77 the biochemist Erwin Chargaff: The quote is from his “Preface to a Grammar of Biology,” Science 172, May 14, 1971. 77 Where do such… from?

The Trouble With Billionaires by Linda McQuaig

"World Economic Forum" Davos, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, carried interest, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, employer provided health coverage, financial deregulation, fixed income, full employment, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, John Bogle, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, laissez-faire capitalism, land tenure, lateral thinking, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, very high income, wealth creators, women in the workforce

In fact, when it was patented in 1804, it was unquestionably the most ‌complex mechanism in the world’.3 Its punched-card technology was the germ of the idea for the computer. (Indeed, the first computers Gates worked on as a student still used punched cards.) Jacquard’s loom was the inspiration for an ambitious calculating machine that is now considered to be a Victorian-age ‘computer’. Developed by British scientist and mathematician Charles Babbage, the machine was an attempt to adapt the punched-card technology of Jacquard’s loom for the tedious task of mathematical calculation. At the time, for instance, tables used to calculate the movement of stars and planets were prepared slowly and painstakingly by clerks who were known, interestingly enough, as ‘computers’.

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So if we were to present the story of the development of the personal computer as a stage play, it would be a rich and complex drama with a long list of characters. From early scenes featuring Joseph Marie Jacquard and his punched-card technology, the play would go on to include starring roles for Charles Babbage, Herman Hollerith, Thomas John Watson, J. Presper Eckert, John Mauchly, Douglas Engelbart and Bill English, with a host of other largely unidentified characters playing crucial supporting roles onstage and off. Toward the end of this rather long drama, there’d be an intriguing subplot about how technological innovator Gary Kildall thought he had a deal with IBM, only to discover his friend Bill Gates had sold IBM an adaptation of Kildall’s own operating system for the first mass-market personal computer.

Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World by Christopher Steiner

23andMe, Ada Lovelace, airport security, Al Roth, algorithmic trading, Apollo 13, backtesting, Bear Stearns, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, call centre, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, delta neutral, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, dumpster diving, financial engineering, Flash crash, G4S, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, High speed trading, Howard Rheingold, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge economy, late fees, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, medical residency, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Narrative Science, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Pierre-Simon Laplace, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Sergey Aleynikov, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator

And there was no obvious way to apply what’s now called Boolean algebra without machines or computers capable of reading algorithms. That’s not to say nobody tried. Perhaps the most important was Ada Lovelace, who, aside from being a female math scholar in a time when few women were allowed to study, is often recognized as the first hacker. In 1842, while documenting Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, a mechanical computing machine that Babbage never completed, Lovelace devised several different inputs that, theoretically, would make the machine perform certain calculations and tasks. In doing so, Lovelace had composed the first algorithm meant for a machine. Lovelace’s work did not use Boolean symbols, so it was left searching for a way to express the processes of human thought.

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David Berlinski, The Advent of the Algorithm: The 300-Year Journey from an Idea to the Computer (New York: Mariner, 2001), p. 14. 14. Ibid., p. 2. 15. Bertrand Russell, A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz (New York: Cosimo Books, 2008), p. 192. 16. Chabert, A History of Algorithms, p. 44. 17. Bruce Collier and James MacLachlan, Charles Babbage and the Engines of Perfection (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 46. 18. Berlinski, The Advent of the Algorithm, p. 3. 19. William Ewald, From Kant to Hilbert: A Source Book in the Foundations of Mathematics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 446. 20. Paul Nahin, The Science of Radio (New York: Springer-Verlag, 2001), p. xxxvi. 21.

The Capitalist Manifesto by Johan Norberg

AltaVista, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, failed state, Filter Bubble, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Indoor air pollution, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, Minecraft, multiplanetary species, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, open economy, passive income, Paul Graham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, planned obsolescence, precariat, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sam Bankman-Fried, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, social distancing, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Virgin Galactic, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey, X Prize, you are the product, zero-sum game

Tim Harford, The Next Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy, Hachette, 2020, chap.24. 6. In an email correspondence documented on NetHistory: www.nethistory.info/Archives/origins.html. 7. Mazzucato 2021, p.123. 8. Oral history interview with R. W. Taylor, William Aspray, Charles Babbage Institute, 28 February 1989. https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/107666, p.42f. 9. Oral history interview with Paul Baran, Judy O’Neill, Charles Babbage Institute, 5 March 1990, https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/107101, p.34. 10. Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom, HarperCollins, 2020. 11. Jonathan Coopersmith, ‘Pornography, technology, and progress’, Icon, vol.4, 1998. 12.

Track Changes by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum

active measures, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, commoditize, computer age, Computer Lib, corporate governance, David Brooks, dematerialisation, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, Dynabook, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, forensic accounting, future of work, Future Shock, Google Earth, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Haight Ashbury, HyperCard, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, machine readable, machine translation, mail merge, Marshall McLuhan, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, popular electronics, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social web, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, text mining, thinkpad, Turing complete, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, Year of Magical Thinking

But materiality also grounds us. It demystifies. Materiality is where—is how—our knowing begins. ONE WORD PROCESSING AS A LITERARY SUBJECT Not long after he began work in earnest on the mechanical tabulating machine that would be called the Difference Engine, the nineteenth-century British inventor Charles Babbage found himself a regular guest at the table of Samuel Rogers, a poet who lived in a lavishly rebuilt house in London’s St. James overlooking Green Park. The two had struck up a friendship through Rogers’s brother, a banker, with whom Babbage had financial dealings. Rogers’s breakfasts had long been an institution among London’s literati, a place where Coleridge might talk with J.

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“Typographical errors were now of no import, and text became literally plastic with cut-and-paste.”108 His third novel, Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) became his first actually written on a computer; shortly after he and Sterling would collaborate on The Difference Engine (1990), a novel set in an alternative Victorian era. Just as Neuromancer is widely regarded as a touchstone for cyberpunk, The Difference Engine inaugurated the “steampunk” genre, which posits that the Victorians (typically in the person of Charles Babbage) had been successful in inventing digital computers. And like cyberpunk before it, steampunk offers an homage to the idea of the sentient machine. Gibson and Sterling’s novel is in fact narrated by a computer, a device we have seen before from John Barth and Michael Frayn. Here the “Narratron” assembles the story from a bricolage of sources encoded among its vast libraries of punched cards.

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His guitar technique may be ineffable, but something as mundane as a particular brand of battery? That we can grasp hold of. (I am grateful to Alan Galey for suggesting this story to me.) 43. Tom McCarthy, “Writing Bytes,” New York Times Book Review, November 3, 2013, 12. 1. Word Processing as a Literary Subject 1. The episode is recounted in Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (London: Longman, 1864), 192–194. 2. Ricardo Birmele, “WordPerfect,” Byte, December 1984, 277. 3. Art Spikol, “Processed Words,” Writer’s Digest, August 1983, 8. 4. Ray Hammond, The Writer and the Word Processor (London: Coronet, 1984), 9. Hammond is a science writer and futurologist.

Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence by Jacob Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Basel III, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial exclusion, financial innovation, friendly fire, future of work, hallucination problem, hive mind, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, medical malpractice, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, nudge unit, obamacare, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Philippa Foot, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, technological singularity, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, trolley problem, Turing test, Vernor Vinge

See also Daniel Susskind and Richard Susskind, The Future of the Professions : How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 5See Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 6See Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking Press, 2005). 7Several nineteenth-century thinkers including Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace arguably predicted the advent of AI and even prepared designs for machines capable of carrying out intelligent tasks. There is some debate as to whether Babbage actually believed that such a machine was capable of cognition. See, for example, Christopher D. Green, “Charles Babbage, the Analytical Engine, and the Possibility of a 19th-Century Cognitive Science”, in The Transformation of Psychology, edited by Christopher D.

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Green, “Charles Babbage, the Analytical Engine, and the Possibility of a 19th-Century Cognitive Science”, in The Transformation of Psychology, edited by Christopher D. Green, Thomas Teo, and Marlene Shore (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Press, 2001), 133–152. See also Ada Lovelace, “Notes by the Translator”, Reprinted in R.A. Hyman, ed. Science and Reform: Selected Works of Charles Babbage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 267–311. 8What follows is by no means intended to be exhaustive. For a far more comprehensive survey of AI and robotics in popular culture, religion and science, see George Zarkadakis, In Our Image: Will Artificial Intelligence Save or Destroy Us? (London: Rider, 2015). 9T. Abusch, “Blood in Israel and Mesopotamia”, in Emanuel: Studies in the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, and the Dead Sea Scrolls in Honor of Emanuel Tov, edited by Shalom M.

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, computer age, computer vision, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, decarbonisation, deskilling, digital rights, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, gigafactory, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, precariat, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Bankman-Fried, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working poor, workplace surveillance

He would not have known it then—though he certainly thought highly of himself and his “imperative duty” to advance his profit-generating machinery—but he had helped clear a path for those pursuing ever more ambitious scales of automation. Less than two decades after the Luddite uprisings, the effort to imagine and build human-free factories began in earnest. Charles Babbage, the inventor of the schema for one of the first modern computers, would declare that his difference engine could be used to computerize the entire factory system. (In an ironic twist, Lord Byron’s estranged daughter, Ada Lovelace, would write history’s first software programs by expanding on Babbage’s work.)

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They had a daughter, Augusta Ada, and Byron only regressed further. (Years later, Ada went on to marry the future Earl of Lovelace, and, tutored by her mother to avoid the arts or any pursuit that might lead her down a path like her father’s, grew interested in mathematics. She cemented her own legend by collaborating with the inventor Charles Babbage, and wrote a paper in which she envisioned and explained the uses of his proto-computer, the Analytical Engine, better than he could. She is known today as the first computer programmer, and the founder of scientific computing. Byron did not live to see any of this, though he may have had a hint of her talents.

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And the Netflix series Black Mirror is basically one dystopian Frankenstein story after another, in which invasive technologies designed for personal profit spiral out of control. In each of these examples, automation, operating at its zenith—in a form that Industrial Revolution–era technology boosters like Andrew Ure and Charles Babbage might admire—displaces humanity, usually violently and forcefully, to profit a corporate Frankenstein. Technological violence, dystopia, even the mass extinction of humans, is the end result. The films aren’t shy about this, even if we have gradually become inured to the message. These tech firms and their creations—Weyland-Yutani and its replicants, Cyberdyne and SkyNet—are the collective fears that have stuck.

The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture by Brian Dear

air traffic controllers' union, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple Newton, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fairchild Semiconductor, finite state, Future Shock, game design, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, lateral thinking, linear programming, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Palm Treo, Plato's cave, pre–internet, publish or perish, Ralph Nader, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, three-martini lunch, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog

Photo by Brian K. Johnson, News-Gazette, Champaign, Illinois, 1986 32. Drawing by Ted Nelson. Used with permission. 33. Image courtesy of the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota Libraries, Minneapolis, Minnesota 34. Photo provided by Bob Morris 35. Photo provided by Bob Morris 36. Photo by Gary Brown, 2007 37. Photo provided by Bob Morris 38. Photo provided by Bob Morris 39. Photo provided by Bob Morris 40. Image courtesy of the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota Libraries, Minneapolis, Minnesota 41. Screen image provided by Bill Lynch A Note About the Author Brian Dear is a longtime tech start-up entrepreneur and founder of companies, including Coconut Computing, FlatWorks, Eventful, and Nettle.

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This book would not have been possible without the eager, enthusiastic support of the staffs at the Library of Congress; the University of Illinois Archives; the University of Illinois Library; Brigham Young University Library and Special Collections; the University of Washington Library; the University of Maryland Baltimore County Library; the University of Maryland College Park Library; the University of California San Diego Library; San Diego State University Library; the University of New Mexico Library; the Ohio State University Library; and the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota. Thanks to the staff of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, who in 2010 co-produced with me a two-day conference celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the PLATO system. Five hundred people attended what turned out to be the largest event ever held at the museum up until that time.

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That ever-growing list prompted ever more people to contact me: a virtuous cycle that has never stopped—it continues right up to the present day. The result is a book largely based on oral history, capturing, before they are forever lost, the stories of the people who participated in the late, great online community known as PLATO. Abbreviations BYU, Brigham Young University CBI-UM, Charles Babbage Institute—University of Minnesota CERL, Computer-Based Education Research Laboratory, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign CHM, Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California CSL, Control Systems Laboratory (1952–1957), Coordinated Science Laboratory (1958–) DI, The Daily Illini, the official newspaper of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ECE, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign NG, Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, News-Gazette PCP, PLATO Corrections Project UIC, University of Illinois at Chicago (formerly University of Illinois Chicago Circle) UIUC, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Interviews Author’s Interviews If no location specified, interview was conducted via telephone.

Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think by Alan Grafen; Mark Ridley

Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, bioinformatics, Charles Babbage, cognitive bias, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Dava Sobel, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, Haight Ashbury, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, loose coupling, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, phenotype, profit maximization, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The answer that he arrived at predicted the essential distinction between DNA (instructions) and transcriptase (machinery that follows instructions) several years before Crick and Watson’s discovery. Surprisingly, though, the very first example of activity fusing computing and biology is over a century older than the work of Turing and von Neumann, predating even Darwin’s Origin of Species. It is due to Charles Babbage, designer of the Difference Engine, the first automatic calculating machine and the progenitor of the modern computer. As early as 1837, Babbage reported using this machine to help him demonstrate that inexplicably abrupt changes in the geological record need not be taken to be the work of God (a hot topic of the day).

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At the time, it remained an act of faith to believe that this kind of preprogramming could, unlike fundamentally inexplicable acts of divine intervention, be understood through regular science (in the same way that careful examination of Babbage’s engine would have revealed the laws that governed its surprising behavior). For more discussion, see S. Bullock, ‘Charles Babbage and the emergence of automated reason’, in P. Husbands, O. Holland, and M. Wheeler (eds.), The History of the Mechanization of Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, forthcoming). 4 C. G. Langton (ed.), Artificial Life: An Overview (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). 5 R. Dawkins, ‘The evolution of evolvability’, in C.

Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America by Giles Slade

Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, American ideology, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, creative destruction, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, global village, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, invention of radio, Jeff Hawkins, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, PalmPilot, planned obsolescence, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, white picket fence, women in the workforce

As we have seen in the preceding chapters, psychological obsolescence is one of a complex set of corporate strategies firs adopted in the 1920s to confront the challenge of overproduction by creating an endlessly renewable market for goods. Much earlier—in 1832—the Cambridge mathematics professor Charles Babbage firs described technological obsolescence as an inherent (but unnamed) phenomenon created by the industrial revolution.4 Both kinds of obsolescence have since been wholeheartedly embraced by American industry, for all kinds of goods, from pantyhose to skateboards. But as Moore’s Law predicts, the rate at which consumer electronics become obsolete is unique, because of integrated chip technology and miniaturization.

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Cell Phones and E-Waste 1. Betty Fishbein, Waste in the Wireless World (New York: Inform, 2001), pp. 22, 27. 2. Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, Poison PCs and Toxic TVs: California’s Biggest Environmental Crisis that You’ve Never Heard Of (San Jose: 2001), p. 8. 3. Fishbein, Waste in the Wireless World, p. 22. 4. Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machines and Manufacturers (1832), available online from Project Gutenberg: http://www .gutenberg.net/etext03/cnmmm10.txt: “Machinery for producing any commodity in great demand seldom actually wears out; new improvements, by which the same operations can be executed either more quickly or better, generally superseding it long before that period arrives: indeed, to make such an improved machine profitable it is usually reckoned that in fi e years it ought to have paid itself,and in ten to be superseded by a better.” 5.

Hacker's Delight by Henry S. Warren

Charles Babbage, Donald Knuth, Free Software Foundation, John von Neumann

Software—Practice and Experience 16, 7 (July 1986), 641-652. [BGN] Burks, Arthur W., Goldstine, Herman H., and von Neumann, John. "Preliminary Discussion of the Logical Design of an Electronic Computing Instrument, Second Edition" (1947). In Papers of John von Neumann on Computing and Computing Theory, Volume 12 in the Charles Babbage Institute Reprint Series for the History of Computing, MIT Press, 1987. [CJS] Stephenson, Christopher J. Private communication. [Cohen] These rules were pointed out by Norman H. Cohen. [Cut] Cutland, Nigel J. Computability: An Introduction to Recursive Function Theory. Cambridge University Press, 1980.

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[Irvine] Irvine, M. M. "Early Digital Computers at Bell Telephone Laboratories." IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 23, 3 (July-September 2001), 22-42. [JVN] von Neumann, John. "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC." In Papers of John von Neumann on Computing and Computing Theory, Volume 12 in the Charles Babbage Institute Reprint Series for the History of Computing, MIT Press, 1987. [Ken] Found in a GNU C compiler for the RS/6000 that was ported by Richard Kenner. He attributes this to a 1992 PLDI conference paper by him and Torbjörn Granlund. [Knu1] Knuth, Donald E. The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 1, Third Edition: Fundamental Algorithms.

Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age by Leslie Berlin

AltaVista, Apple II, Arthur D. Levinson, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, book value, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, Computer Lib, discovery of DNA, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, game design, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Oklahoma City bombing, packet switching, Project Xanadu, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, union organizing, upwardly mobile, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, work culture

Rick, Corbin, and Lily Dodd: you are my stars. Steve, Vera, Jessica, and Loren Berlin; Jim, Liz, Ryan, and Rob Dodd; Debbie, Brian, John, Olga, Katie, Lukas, Trevor, Sadie, Fiona, and James: you are the best. Abbreviations Used in Notes Section AA Al Alcorn ACM Courtesy Mike Markkula AR Courtesy Arthur Rock CBI Charles Babbage Institute, Oral History Collection CHM Computer History Museum, Oral History Collection EKF Courtesy Eugene Kleiner Family GC Courtesy Gene Carter HK Courtesy Howard Klein KK Courtesy Kathy Ku MB Courtesy Marty Browne MG Courtesy Manny Gerard NVCA National Venture Capital Association, Oral History Project collection PSC Pacific Studies Center Archives (now at SUSC) RM Courtesy Regis McKenna ROHO Bancroft Library, Oral History Collection (formerly Regional Oral History Office) RWT Courtesy Bob Taylor SB Courtesy Steve Bristow (now at SUSC) SK Courtesy Sandra Kurtzig SSH Courtesy Sally Smith Hughes SUOTL Stanford University, Office of Technology Licensing (now at SUSC) SUSC Stanford University, Special Collections SUSG Stanford University, Silicon Genesis interview collection SV Interview for Something Ventured video production XPA Xerox PARC Archives Interviewees Al Alcorn Bobby Alvarez Jack Balletto Andy Barnes Ann Bowers Steve Bristow Marty Browne Nolan Bushnell Brook Byers Gene Carter Lisa Kleiner Chanoff David Cochran Stan Cohen Joe Decuir Jerry Elkind Vineta [Alvarez] Eubank Doug Fairbairn Terry Floyd Manny Gerard Chuck Geschke Laura Gould Andy Grove John Hall Trip Hawkins Sally Hines Steve Jobs Pitch Johnson Alan Kay Joe Keenan Steve Kent Howard Klein Robert Kleiner Kathy Ku Sandy Kurtzig Butler Lampson Tom Lavey Ann Kieffaber Marty Manley Natalie Jean Marine-Street Mike Markkula Bob Maxfield Kathie Maxfield Steve Mayer Regis McKenna Burt McMurtry Carla Meninsky Bob Metcalfe Rich Moran George Murphy Severo Ornstein Bill Osborn Chuck Peddle Bill Pitts Jim Queen Ron Raffensperger Niels Reimers Arthur Rock Eric Schmidt Lizbeth Seckler John Shoch Dick Shoup Lenny Siegel Jeff Smith Phil Smith Bill Spencer Fawn Alvarez Talbott Bob Taylor Larry Tesler Chuck Thacker Don Valentine Kurt Wallace Barry Wessler Bryant York About the Author © ANNE BARRY LESLIE BERLIN is Project Historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University.

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Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal (New York: Viking, 2001): 266. The IPTO budget rose from $15 million to $19.6 million during the years Taylor served as director; Arthur L. Norberg and Judy E. O’Neill, A History of the Information Processing Techniques Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Minneapolis, MN: Charles Babbage Institute, October 1992): 119. 4. Bob Taylor to Eugene G. Fubini, March 31, 1967, RWT. 5. This story is from Wessler’s comments at Taylor’s retirement party. 6. Waldrop, The Dream Machine: 265. 7. Taylor’s adviser was Lloyd A. Jeffress. 8. For a hilarious depiction of the waiting game that was batch processing, see the two-minute “Ellis D.

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Return to the Little Kingdom: How Apple and Steve Jobs Changed the World. London, UK: Overlook Press, 2010. Mukherjee, Siddhartha. The Gene: An Intimate History. New York: Scribner, 2016. Norberg, Arthur L., and Judy E. O’Neill. A History of the Information Processing Techniques Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Minneapolis: Charles Babbage Institute, 1992. Noyce, Robert N., and Marcian E. Hoff, Jr. “A History of Microprocessor Development at Intel.” IEEE Micro, February 1981: 8–21. O’Mara, Margaret Pugh. Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.

The Road Ahead by Bill Gates, Nathan Myhrvold, Peter Rinearson

Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Donald Knuth, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, glass ceiling, global village, informal economy, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, medical malpractice, Mitch Kapor, new economy, packet switching, popular electronics, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, SimCity, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture

Reliable mechanical calculators, powered by rotating dials and gears, descendants of the Stepped Reckoner, were the mainstay of business until their electronic counterparts replaced them. When I was a boy, a cash register was essentially a mechanical calculator linked to a cash drawer. More than a century and a half ago, a visionary British mathematician glimpsed the possibility of the computer and that glimpse made him famous even in his day. Charles Babbage was a professor of mathematics at Cambridge University who conceived the possibility of a mechanical device that would be able to perform a string of related calculations. As early as the 1830s, he was drawn to the idea that information could be manipulated by a machine if the information could be converted into numbers first.

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Governments have long understood the importance of keeping information private, for both economic and military reasons. The need to make personal, commercial, military, or diplomatic messages secure (or to break into them) has attracted powerful intellects through the generations. It is very satisfying to break an encoded message. Charles Babbage, who made dramatic advances in the art of code breaking in the mid-1800s, wrote: "Deciphering is, in my opinion, one of the most fascinating of arts, and I fear I have wasted upon it more time than it deserves." I discovered its fascination as a kid when, like kids everywhere, a bunch of us played with simple ciphers.

The Most Human Human: What Talking With Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive by Brian Christian

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Blue Ocean Strategy, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, David Heinemeier Hansson, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, George Akerlof, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, l'esprit de l'escalier, language acquisition, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Menlo Park, operational security, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, SimCity, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, starchitect, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Thales of Miletus, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

Thus, in one fell swoop, the master’s thesis of twenty-one-year-old Claude Shannon will break the ground for the processor and for digital mathematics. And it will make his future wife’s profession—although he hasn’t met her yet—obsolete. And it does more than that. It forms a major part of the recent history—from the mechanical logic gates of Charles Babbage through the integrated circuits in our computers today—that ends up amounting to a huge blow to humans’ unique claim to and dominance of the area of “reasoning.” Computers, lacking almost everything else that makes humans humans, have our unique piece in spades. They have more of it than we do.

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Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind (New York: William Morrow, 1998). 10 Alan Turing, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 1937, 2nd ser., 42, no. 1 (1937), pp. 230–65. 11 Ada Lovelace’s remarks come from her translation (and notes thereupon) of Luigi Federico Menabrea’s “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage, Esq.,” in Scientific Memoirs, edited by Richard Taylor (London, 1843). 12 Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 59, no. 236 (October 1950), pp. 433–60. 13 For more on the idea of “radical choice,” see, e.g., Sartre, “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” especially Sartre’s discussion of a painter wondering “what painting ought he to make” and a student who came to ask Sartre’s advice about an ethical dilemma. 14 Aristotle’s arguments: See, e.g., The Nicomachean Ethics. 15 For a publicly traded company: Nobel Prize winner, and (says the Economist) “the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century,” Milton Friedman wrote a piece in the New York Times Magazine in 1970 titled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.”

The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity by Amy Webb

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Flynn Effect, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Inbox Zero, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, optical character recognition, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, uber lyft, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

If this was true, and if we had until this point been capable of creating lifelike ducks and tiny monks, then it should follow that someday, humans could create replicas of themselves—and build a variety of intelligent, thinking machines. Could a Thinking Machine Be Built? By the 1830s, mathematicians, engineers, and scientists had started tinkering, hoping to build machines capable of doing the same calculations as human “computers.” English mathematician Ada Lovelace and scientist Charles Babbage invented a machine called the “Difference Engine” and then later postulated a more advanced “Analytical Engine,” which used a series of predetermined steps to solve mathematical problems. Babbage hadn’t conceived that the machine could do anything beyond calculating numbers. It was Lovelace who, in the footnotes of a scientific paper she was translating, went off on a brilliant tangent speculating that a more powerful version of the Engine could be used in other ways.13 If the machine could manipulate symbols, which themselves could be assigned to different things (such as musical notes), then the Engine could be used to “think” outside of mathematics.

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Thus, in the case of a controversial discussion, two philosophers could sit down at a table and just calculating, like two mathematicians, they could say, ‘Let us check it up.’” 12. “Apes to Androids: Is Man a Machine as La Mettrie Suggests?,” http://www.charliemccarron.com/man_a_machine/. 13. Luigi Manabrea, Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage (London: Richard and John E. Taylor, 1843). 14. Desmond MacHale, The Life and Work of George Boole: A Prelude to the Digital Age, New ed. (Cork University Press, 2014). 15. Logician Martin Davis explains it best in The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing: “Turing knew that an algorithm is typically specified by a list of rules that a person can follow in a precise mechanical manner, like a recipe in a cookbook.

One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw by Witold Rybczynski

Charles Babbage, classic study, Ford Model T, invention of movable type, The Spirit Level, traveling salesman

When the United States developed its own, competing screw industry, it adopted a slightly different standard; continental Europe, which followed the metric system, likewise went its own way. CHAPTER SIX Mechanical Bent MAUDSLAY HAD WHAT IS Often called a mechanical bent. So did the men he trained. Whitworth was the best known, but there were others: Joseph Clement, whom Charles Babbage commissioned to build his famous difference engine, the calculating machine that anticipated the modern computer; Richard Roberts, whose metal planing machine was capable of such precision that he used it to manufacture iron billiard tables; and Maudslay’s personal assistant, James Nasmyth, who went on to invent the steam hammer and the pile driver.

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

When those forms are computational (as for Google), that passage is the capitalized translation of interactions into data and data into interactions, and the movement of these into and out of central locations (such as strongly defended data centers). As we will see, the genealogy of platforms is diverse and seemingly contradictory. Roman urban planners, the encyclopedia of John Wilkins, Charles Babbage, the Commissioners’ Grid Plan of 1811, John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, Lady Ada Byron, Vint Cerf, and others, all contribute to the parentage of platforms, and it is their eccentricity and exteriority from normal state and market institutional models, combining elements of these as well as of machine engineering, that has made them so successful in redrawing the effective terms of global systems.

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For a nontechnical overview, see James Gleick, The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood (New York: Pantheon Books, 2011), especially for a history of longitudinal demarcation, network synchronization, and time zones. 7.  The history of notational systems deserves more than a few dissertations. In order to engineer his difference engine, Charles Babbage first had to invent a now long-forgotten notational system for how parts would be manufactured to make sure that one worker's gesture would be compatible with that of another. Architects know Louis Kahn's notational system to analyze and plan the movement of autonomous agents through pathways, used but once for his unrealized project to redesign automobile traffic flows in Philadelphia.

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This conceptual shift is important to how we hope to consider reforming The Stack. One of Turing's signal achievements is to show that an artificial “machine” could approach, and even approximate, the scope of natural computation, as defined in a particular way. His innovation was the specific pairing of formal logic with industrial technology that was, even after Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace's Victorian-era calculating machines, by no means obvious in its implications. For measuring the significance of that pairing in relation to The Stack, it is important to distinguish the limits of formal computation, on the one hand, from what the limits of actual computational technologies can really do, on the other.

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy) by Benjamin Peters

Albert Einstein, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Anthropocene, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commons-based peer production, computer age, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Davies, double helix, Drosophila, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, index card, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, power law, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, scientific mainstream, scientific management, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, transaction costs, Turing machine, work culture , Yochai Benkler

Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 203–231. 37. Kristie Mackrasis, Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi’s Spy-Tech World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 23, 133, 139, esp. 112–140. 38. Judy O’Neill, “Interview with Paul Baran,” Charles Babbage Institute, OH 182, March 5, 1990, Menlo Park, CA, accessed April 15, 2015, http://www.gtnoise.net/classes/cs7001/fall_2008/readings/baran-int.pdf. 39. Ibid.; see also Stewart Brand, “Founding Father,” Wired 9 (3) (1991), accessed April 15, 2015, http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/9.03/baran_pr.html. 40.

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An Economic History of the USSR, 1917–1991. 3rd ed. New York: Penguin Group, 1992. Odom, William E. The Collapse of the Soviet Military. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. O’Hearn, Dennis. “The Consumer Second Economy: Size and Effects.” Soviet Studies 32 (2) (April 1980): 218–234. O’Neill, Judy. “Interview with Paul Baran.” Charles Babbage Institute, OH 182, Menlo Park, CA, March 5, 1990. Accessed April 15, 2015, http://www.gtnoise.net/classes/cs7001/fall_2008/readings/baran-int.pdf. Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy. New York: Routledge, 1972. O’Shea, Michael. The Brain: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, Ella Morton

anti-communist, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, centre right, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, cosmic microwave background, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Day of the Dead, double helix, East Village, Easter island, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, horn antenna, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index card, intentional community, Jacques de Vaucanson, Kowloon Walled City, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, phenotype, Pluto: dwarf planet, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Tunguska event, urban sprawl, Vesna Vulović, white picket fence, wikimedia commons, working poor

Postman’s Park, St Martin’s Le-Grand, London. The park is near the St. Paul’s station on the Central Tube line. 51.517534 0.097751 Postman’s Park contains a wall of tragic yet inspiring epitaphs dedicated to self-sacrificing individuals. Difference Engine #2 LONDON There was almost a Victorian computer. Charles Babbage came achingly close with his 1822 “Difference Engine,” a design for a hulking gadget with cranks and gears capable of generating mathematical tables. The machine offered a well-thought-out solution to the problem of human error in complex calculations, but it proved too large, complicated, and expensive to construct.

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It functioned flawlessly, confirming Babbage’s rightful place in the annals of computing history. The engine, which features a printing apparatus added in 2002, is now on display at the museum, along with half of Babbage’s brain. (The other half is housed at the Hunterian Museum, also in London.) Science Museum, Exhibition Road, London. 51.498190 0.173972 Now functional: Charles Babbage’s Victorian computer. Jeremy Bentham’s Auto Icon LONDON Jeremy Bentham has been sitting in a corridor at University College London since 1850. The moral philosopher, whose advocacy of animal welfare, prison reform, universal suffrage, and gay rights was far ahead of his time, left a will with specific instructions on the treatment of his corpse.

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Musée Dupuytren Paris After running out of money and being forced to close, this collection of thousands of anatomical waxes, pathological models, and abnormal physiological specimens sat neglected for 30 years before reopening in 1967. Hunterian Museum London The Hunterian Museum’s collection includes half the brain of mathematician Charles Babbage, Winston Churchill’s dentures, and the skeleton of a famed Irish giant. The 7′7″ skeleton of Charles Byrne is on view at the Hunterian Museum. Park of the Monsters BOMARZO, LAZIO The stone sculptures in the Parco dei Mostri emerged from the tormented mind of 16th-century Italian prince Pier Francesco Orsini.

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

—Daniel Defoe, An Essay upon Projects, 1697 The triumph of the industrial arts will advance the cause of civilization more rapidly than its warmest advocates could have hoped, and contribute to the permanent prosperity and strength of the country, far more than the most splendid victories of successful war. The influences thus engendered, the arts thus developed, will long continue to shed their beneficent effects over countries more extensive than those which the sceptre of England rules. —Charles Babbage, The Exposition of 1851: Views of the Industry, the Science, and the Government of England, 1851 On Thursday, June 12, 1851, a group of agricultural laborers from Surrey, in the south of England, donned their best clothing and boarded a train bound for London. Their day out in the capital was not intended for idle sightseeing.

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Eli Whitney’s gin boosted cotton production in the US South, paving the way for the expansion and intensification of slavery. 10. Eli Whitney was also a pioneer in the adoption of interchangeable parts in the US North, increasing the productivity of unskilled labor and reducing the need for skilled labor. This illustration shows machine gears designed by Charles Babbage, who was in pursuit of a “fully-automatic calculating machine.” 11. George Stephenson’s Rocket decisively won the Rainhill Trials in 1829 and became the basis for designs that swept the world. 12. Archimedes, built in the 1880s, waiting for passengers in Euston Station. Railways paid high wages and spearheaded the expansion of British industry. 13.

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She also views the “bourgeois virtues” as unabashedly positive and does not share our emphasis that the emergent vision was attempting to rise within the existing system and thus was not likely to be conducive to a broad-based enrichment or favor the working classes. Our discussion of the institutional changes in England draws heavily on Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2005b) and Acemoglu and Robinson (2012). Opening epigraphs. Defoe (1697 [1887], first line of the Author’s Introduction); Charles Babbage (1851 [1968], 103). The story about workers visiting the Crystal Palace is from Leapman (2001, Chapter 1). Details on what was on display at the Great Exhibition are from the Official Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, 1851 (Spicer Brothers, London). For more context, see Auerbach (1999) and Shears (2017).

Geek Wisdom by Stephen H. Segal

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 13, battle of ideas, biofilm, Charles Babbage, fear of failure, Henri Poincaré, Jacquard loom, Large Hadron Collider, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, nuclear paranoia, Saturday Night Live, Snow Crash, Vernor Vinge, W. E. B. Du Bois

Forbidden Planet, the greatest science-fiction film ever inspired by Shakespeare, explored the id more tangibly in 1956. “ONLY SPARTAN WOMEN GIVE BIRTH TO REAL MEN.” —QUEEN GORGO, 300 “THE ANALYTICAL ENGINE WEAVES ALGEBRAIC PATTERNS, JUST AS THE JACQUARD LOOM WEAVES FLOWERS AND LEAVES.” —ADA LOVELACE, ON CHARLES BABBAGE’S ANALYTICAL ENGINE THE REAL QUEEN GORGO of Sparta was a political mover and shaker on par with the modern age’s most respected power brokers. She was also a geek and early cryptanalyst, helping her fellow Spartans find the code hidden in a chiseled wooden board that warned of impending Persian attack.

Journey to Crossrail by Stephen Halliday

active transport: walking or cycling, Ada Lovelace, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Charles Babbage, congestion charging, Crossrail, wikimedia commons

An early (and for a woman of that time uncharacteristic) interest in mathematics and logic was encouraged by her mother, possibly as a perceived antidote to the reckless behaviour and perceived insanity of Byron himself. As a young woman, and with her mother’s encouragement, she met Charles Dickens and the scientist Michael Faraday. More significantly, through an introduction by her personal tutor Mary Somerville she met the mathematician Charles Babbage, with whom she worked on his Analytical Engine, an idea for an early mechanical computer. Mary Somerville, herself a Mathematician, later gave her name to Somerville College, Oxford. Between 1842 and 1843, Ada translated an article by Italian military engineer Luigi Menabrea together with notes which resemble a simple computer programme.

The Haskell Road to Logic, Maths and Programming by Kees Doets, Jan van Eijck, Jan Eijck

Albert Einstein, Charles Babbage, Eratosthenes, functional programming, Georg Cantor, P = NP, Russell's paradox

Here is a concrete example of computing difference sequences until we hit at a constant sequence: -12 -11 1 6 17 16 45 39 22 6 112 67 28 6 213 101 34 6 354 141 40 6 541 187 46 6 We find that the sequence of third differences is constant, which means that the form of the original sequence is a polynomial of degree 3. To find the next number 334 CHAPTER 9. POLYNOMIALS in the sequence, just take the sum of the last elements of the rows. This gives 6 + 46 + 187 + 541 = 780. Charles Babbage (1791–1871), one of the founding fathers of computer science, used these observations in the design of his difference engine. We will give a Haskell version of the machine. According to Proposition 9.2, if a given input list has a polynomial form of degree k, then after k steps of taking differences the list is reduced to a constant list: POL> difs [-12,-11,6,45,112,213,354,541,780,1077] [1,17,39,67,101,141,187,239,297] POL> difs [1,17,39,67,101,141,187,239,297] [16,22,28,34,40,46,52,58] POL> difs [16,22,28,34,40,46,52,58] [6,6,6,6,6,6,6] The following function keeps generating difference lists until the differences get constant: difLists :: [[Integer]]->[[Integer]] difLists [] = [] difLists lists@(xs:xss) = if constant xs then lists else difLists ((difs xs):lists) where constant (n:m:ms) = all (==n) (m:ms) constant _ = error "lack of data or not a polynomial fct" This gives the lists of all the difference lists that were generated from the initial sequence, with the constant list upfront.

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In the implementation: POL> (1 + z + z^2 + z^3 + z^4 + z^5)^3 [1,3,6,10,15,21,25,27,27,25,21,15,10,6,3,1] Exercise 9.20 Use polynomials to find out how many ways there are of selecting ten red, blue or white marbles from a vase, in such manner that the number of marbles from each colour is prime. 9.5 Further Reading Charles Babbage’s difference engine is described in [Lar34] (reprinted in [Bab61]), and by Babbage himself in his memoirs [Bab94]. The memoirs are very amusing: Among the various questions which have been asked respecting the Difference Engine, I will mention a few of the most remarkable: one gentleman addressed me thus: ‘Pray, Mr Babbage, can you explain to me in two words what is the principle of your machine?’

Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets by David J. Leinweber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, asset allocation, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, butterfly effect, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Danny Hillis, demand response, disintermediation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Gordon Gekko, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, information retrieval, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, load shedding, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, market fragmentation, market microstructure, Mars Rover, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, negative equity, Network effects, optical character recognition, paper trading, passive investing, pez dispenser, phenotype, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, semantic web, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, smart grid, smart meter, social web, South Sea Bubble, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing machine, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, value engineering, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, yield curve, Yogi Berra, your tax dollars at work

Here we see two specialists celebrating the first bagging1 of a buy-side trader. 12 Nerds on Wall Str eet So far, the technologies we’re talking may sound rather low-tech: roofs, chalk, hands. Here’s what a computer looked like in 1823, the Difference Engine, invented by the famously brilliant, eccentric, and obnoxious Charles Babbage: Here’s Babbage, who said, “I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam.” Here’s Babbage’s government sponsor, Prime Minister Robert Peel, who said, “What shall we do to get rid of Mr. Babbage and his calculating machine?” Babbage was stunningly smart, and even more stunningly insufferable.

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In the 1930s, if you said you had six computers in your office, this is what you meant—the NYSE computing department circa 1930: An Illustrated History of Wir ed Markets 23 “Computer” was a job, not a thing. If you said you had a supercomputer, this is what you meant. At about this time, the technological legacy of Charles Babbage stirred again at the Moore School of Engineering in Philadelphia. ENIAC (short for electronic numerical integrator and calculator), the first electronic computer, was developed in 1946 by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly. It weighed 30,000 pounds, had a 900-bit memory, ran at .017 MIPS (million instructions per second), and blew a tube every 45 minutes.

Lonely Planet London by Lonely Planet

Boris Johnson, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Babbage, congestion charging, Crossrail, death from overwork, discovery of the americas, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Etonian, financial independence, gentrification, haute couture, haute cuisine, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, market design, place-making, post-work, Russell Brand, Skype, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, urban renewal, Winter of Discontent

Hunterian Museum Museum Offline map Google map (www.rcseng.ac.uk/museums; Royal College of Surgeons, 35-43 Lincoln’s Inn Fields WC2; 10am-5pm Tue-Sat; Holborn) The collection of anatomical specimens of pioneering surgeon John Hunter (1728–93) inspired this fascinating, slightly morbid, little-known, yet fantastic London museum. Among the more bizarre items on display are the skeleton of a 2.3m giant, half of mathematician Charles Babbage’s brain and, hilariously, Winston Churchill’s dentures. Thanks to a massive refurbishment some years back, the atmosphere is less gory and allows decent viewing of such things as animal digestive systems (forensically documented in formaldehyde) and the ‘hearing organ’ of a blue whale. Upstairs there’s a display on surgery techniques, which will impress and disgust in equal measure.

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Nostalgic parents will delight in the Apollo 10 command module in the Making the Modern World gallery . An intriguing detour on the 1st floor is Listening Post , a haunting immersion into the ‘sound’ and chatter of the internet interspersed with thoughtful silence. The History of Computing on the 2nd floor displays some intriguing devices, from Charles Babbage’s analytical engine to hulking valve-based computers. The 3rd-floor Flight Gallery (free tours 1pm most days) is a favourite places for children, with its gliders, hot-air balloon and varied aircraft. The hi-tech Wellcome Wing has an IMAX Cinema (£10) that shows the usual crop of travelogues, space adventures and dinosaur attacks in stunning 3-D.

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The hi-tech Wellcome Wing has an IMAX Cinema (£10) that shows the usual crop of travelogues, space adventures and dinosaur attacks in stunning 3-D. If you’ve kids under the age of five, pop down to the basement and The Garden , where there’s a fun-filled play zone, including a water-play area, besieged by tots in red waterproof smocks. Don’t Miss... » Apollo 10 command module » Stephenson’s Rocket » Listening Post » Charles Babbage’s analytical engine Practicalities » Offline map » 0870 870 4868 » www.sciencemuseum.org.uk » Exhibition Rd SW7 » admission free » 10am-6pm » » South Kensington Wellington Arch Monument Offline map Google map ( 7930 2726; www.english-heritage.org.uk; Hyde Park Corner W1; adult/child £3.90/2.30, with Apsley House £7.90/4.70; 10am-5pm Wed-Sun Apr-Oct, to 4pm Nov-Mar; ; Hyde Park Corner) This magnificent neoclassical 1826 arch, facing Apsley House in the green space strangled by the Hyde Park Corner roundabout, originally faced the Hyde Park Screen, but was shunted here in 1882 for road widening.

Energy and Civilization: A History by Vaclav Smil

8-hour work day, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, animal electricity, Apollo 11, Boeing 747, business cycle, carbon-based life, centre right, Charles Babbage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Just-in-time delivery, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kibera, knowledge economy, land tenure, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, Louis Blériot, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, North Sea oil, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, phenotype, precision agriculture, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Feynman, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, Toyota Production System, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

Maxwell’s formulation of the theory of electromagnetism opened the way to the still unfolding exploits of modern wireless electronics that have brought inexpensive instant communication and global connectivity: the e-world of the twenty-first century rests on Maxwell’s insights. Regular radio broadcasts started in 1920. BBC offered the first scheduled television service in 1936, and RCA followed suit in 1939 (Huurdeman 2003). Mechanical calculators—starting with prescient designs by Charles Babbage and Edward Scheutz after 1820 (Lindgren 1990; Swade 1991) and culminating in the establishment of IBM in 1911—were finally left behind with the development of the first electronic computers during World War II. But these machines—the British Mark, the U.S. Harvard Mark 1, and the ENIAC—were unique, dedicated, massive (room-sized, to accommodate thousands of glass vacuum tubes) devices with no immediate commercial prospects.

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BCE 1,700,000 + Oldowan stone tools (<0.5 m of edge/kg of stone) 250,000 + Acheulean stone tools 150,000 + Mousterian stone flake tools 50,000 + Bone objects 30,000 + Aurignacian stone tools Bow and stone arrows 15,000 + Magdalenian stone tools (12 m of edge/kg of stone) 9,000 + Sheep domesticated in the Middle East 7,400 + Corn in Oaxaca Valley 7,000 + Wheat in Mesopotamia Pigs domesticated in the Middle East 6,500 + Cattle domesticated in the Middle East 6,000 + Copper artifacts more common in the Middle East 5,000 + Barley in Egypt Corn in the basin of Mexico 4,400 + Potatoes in highland Peru and Bolivia 4,000 + Light wooden plows in Mesopotamia 3,500 + Pack asses in the Middle East Wooden ships in the Mediterranean Pottery and bricks fired in kilns in Mesopotamia Irrigation in Mesopotamia 3,200 + Wheeled vehicles in Uruk 3,000 + Square sail in Egypt Draft oxen in Mesopotamia Camel domesticated Potter’s wheel in Mesopotamia 2,800 + Pyramid construction in Egypt 2,500 + Bronze in Mesopotamia Small glass objects in Egypt 2,000 + Spoked wheel in Mesopotamia Horse-drawn vehicles in Egypt Shaduf in Mesopotamia 1,700 + Horse riding 1,500 + Copper in China Paddy rice in China Axle lubricants in the Middle East 1,400 + Iron in Mesopotamia 1,300 + Seed drill in Mesopotamia Horse-drawn chariots in China 1,200 + Iron more common in India, Middle East, Europe 800 + Mounted archers on Asian steppes Candles in the Middle East 600 + Tin in Greece Penteconter ships common in Greece Archimedean screw in Egyptian irrigation 500 + North Arabian camel saddle Trireme in Greece 400 + Crossbow in China 432 Parthenon completed 300 + Stirrups in China Gears in Egypt and Greece 312 Roman Via Appia and Aqua Appia completed 200 + Breastband harness in China Sailings to windward advances in China Batten-strengthened sails in China Percussion drilling in Sichuan Crank handle in China 150 + Iron moldboard plows in China 100 + Beginnings of collar harness in China House heating by coal in China Waterwheels in Greece and Rome Wheelbarrow in China Norias in the Middle East 80 + Hypocaust heating in Rome CE 300 Roman cursus publicus surpasses 80,000 km 600 + Windmills (Iran) 850 + Triangular sail in the Mediterranean 900 + Collar harness and horseshoes common in Europe Bamboo fire-lances in China 980 + Canal pound lock in China 1000 + Widespread adoption of waterwheels in Western Europe 1040 Clear directions for gunpowder preparation in China 1100 + Long bow in England 1150 + Windmills spreading in Western Europe 1200 + Inca road construction 1280 + Cannons in China 1300 + Gunpowder and cannons in Europe 1327 Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal (1,800 km long) completed 1350 + Handheld guns in Europe 1400 + Heavy draft horses in Europe Drainage windmills in the Netherlands Blast furnaces in the Rhine region 1420 + Portuguese caravels make longer sailings 1492 Columbus sails across the Atlantic 1497 Vasco da Gama sails to India 1519 Magellan’s Victoria circumnavigates the Earth 1550 + Large full-rigged sail ships with guns in Western Europe 1600 + Ball bearings in Western Europe 1640 + English coal mining expands 1690 Experiments with atmospheric steam engine (Denis Papin) 1698 Simple, small steam engine (Thomas Savery) 1709 Coke from bituminous coal (Abraham Darby) 1712 Atmospheric steam engine (Thomas Newcomen) 1745 Fantail for automatic turning of windmills 1750 + Intensive canal construction in Western Europe Use of coke spreads in English iron making Newcomen’s engine more common in English coal mines 1757 Precision-cutting lathe (Henry Maudslay) 1769 James Watt patents a separate condenser for steam engine 1770s Factories powered by waterwheels 1775 Watt’s patent extended to 1800 1782 Hot air balloon (Joseph and Etienne Montgolfier) 1794 Lamps with wick holders and glass chimneys (Aimé Argand) 1800 Electric battery (Alessandro Volta) 1800s Steamboats (Charlotte Dundas, Clermont) High-pressure steam engines (R. Trevithick, O. Evans) 1805 Steam-powered crane (John Rennie) Coal (town) gas in England 1808 Arc lamp (Humphrey Davy) 1809 Chilean nitrates discovered 1816 Mine safety lamp (Humphrey Davy) 1820s Designs of mechanical calculators (Charles Babbage) Iron ship hulls 1820 Electromagnetism (Hans C. Oersted) 1823 Silicon isolated (J. J. Berzelius) 1824 Portland cement (Joseph Aspdin) Aluminum isolated (Hans C. Oersted) 1825 Stockton-Darlington railway 1828 Hot blast in ironmaking (James Neilson) 1829 Rocket locomotive (Robert Stephenson) 1830s Railway construction takes off in England Steamship cross the Atlantic Mechanical grain reaper (Cyrus McCormick, Obed Hussey) 1830 Thermostat (Andrew Ure) Liverpool-Manchester railway 1832 Water turbine (Benoît Fourneyron) 1833 Steel plow (John Lane) Steamship Royal William crosses from Quebec to London 1834 Free-standing kitchen range (Philo P.

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Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Subcommittee on Horse Nutrition. 1978. Nutrient Requirements of Horses. Washington, DC: NAS. Sullivan, R. J. 1990. The revolution of ideas: Widespread patenting and invention during the English Industrial Revolution. Journal of Economic History 50:349–362. Swade, D. 1991. Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines. London: Science Museum. Taeuber, I. B. 1958. The Population of Japan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tainter, J. A. 1988. The Collapse of Complex Societies. New York: Cambridge University Press. Takamatsu, N., et al. 2014. Steel recycling circuit in the world.

The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication From Ancient Times to the Internet by David Kahn

anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, end-to-end encryption, Fellow of the Royal Society, heat death of the universe, Honoré de Balzac, index card, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Louis Daguerre, machine translation, Maui Hawaii, Norbert Wiener, out of africa, pattern recognition, place-making, planned obsolescence, Plato's cave, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, positional goods, Republic of Letters, Searching for Interstellar Communications, stochastic process, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, trade route, Turing machine, union organizing, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

Yet cryptologic history shows no one ever having used them, even though they are far superior to many systems that have seen service. Most remarkable of the Victorian congregation of cryptologists was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, the pioneer who enunciated the principles on which today’s huge electronic computers are based and who himself built their prototypes: Charles Babbage. Most of his cryptologic work was never published and hence never played a role in the science, but it was astonishingly advanced. He was among the first to use mathematical notations and formulas in cryptanalysis; he solved polyalphabetics at a time when the system was still regarded as “le chiffre indéchiffrable;” he appears to have been the first to solve an autokey.

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“One of the most singular characteristics of the art of deciphering,” he declared in his autobiography, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, “is the strong conviction possessed by every person, even moderately acquainted with it, that he is able to construct a cipher which nobody else can decipher. I have also observed that the cleverer the person, the more intimate is his conviction. In my earliest study of the subject, I shared in this belief, and maintained it for many years. Charles Babbage uses mathematics to solve a cipher “In a conversation on that subject which I had with the late Mr. Davies Gilbert, President of the Royal Society,” he continued, “each maintained that he possessed a cipher which was absolutely inscrutable. On comparison, it appeared that we had both imagined the same law.”

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Poorly endowed with empathy, he never considers the possibility that cipher clerks will not dote as lovingly upon the complex calculations of his cipher as he does; he fails to realize that to the clerks ciphering is not a pleasant after-hours recreation but a day-long, dull, boring job, about as exciting as adding up columns of figures, and that they would rather be out on a date with a girl friend. Charles Babbage asserted that no man’s cipher was worth looking at unless the inventor had himself solved a very difficult cipher. This rule holds true in the great majority of cases and if observed would have saved cryptologists a great deal of time. But it would be like having required Thomas Edison to pass a stiff examination in acoustical theory before deigning to look at his phonograph.

Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence by Calum Chace

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, discovery of the americas, disintermediation, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Flash crash, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hedonic treadmill, hype cycle, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, life extension, low skilled workers, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter Thiel, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, wage slave, Wall-E, zero-sum game

Turing is also famous for inventing a test for artificial consciousness called the Turing Test, in which a machine proves that it is conscious by rendering a panel of human judges unable to determine that it is not (which is essentially the test that we humans apply to each other). The birth of computing The first design for a Turing machine was made by Charles Babbage, a Victorian academic and inventor, long before Turing’s birth. Babbage never finished the construction of his devices, although working machines have recently been built based on his designs. His Difference Engine (designed in 1822) would carry out basic mathematical functions, and the Analytical Engine (design never completed) would carry out general purpose computation.

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

Bloomfield, The Question of Artificial Intelligence: Philosophical and Sociological Perspectives, in Annals of the History of Computing 10, no. 3 (1998). 15.Ibid. 16.Nilsson, The Quest for Artificial Intelligence, 77. 17.AI@50, Dartmouth College Artificial Intelligence Conference, July 13–15, 2006. 18.Interview with John McCarthy, Stanford University, July 19, 2001. 19.Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984). 20.Interview with John McCarthy, Stanford University, July 19, 2001. 21.Raj Reddy, “Celebration of John McCarthy’s Accomplishments,” Stanford University, March 25, 2012, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_QGryGFb2o. 22.Arthur L. Norberg, “An Interview with Bruce G. Buchanan,” June 11–12, 1991, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/107165/1/oh230bb.pdf. 23.Hans Moravec, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 20. 24.John McCarthy, “A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence,” August 31, 1955, http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmouth.html. 25.William J.

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Abelson, Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures, Artificial Intelligence Series (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1977). 17.Searle presentation before CS22 Introduction to the Philosophy and History of Artificial Intelligence, Stanford, October 25, 2013. 18.Arthur L. Norberg, “An Interview with Terry Allen Winograd,” December 11, 1991, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/107717/1/oh237taw. 19.Sergey Brin, Rajeev Motwani, Lawrence Page, and Terry Winograd, “What Can You Do with a Web in Your Pocket?” IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin 21, no. 2 (1998): 37–47, http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?

The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility by Robert Zubrin

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, battle of ideas, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological principle, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gravity well, if you build it, they will come, Internet Archive, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Menlo Park, more computing power than Apollo, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off grid, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Recombinant DNA, rising living standards, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuart Kauffman, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, time dilation, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine

Energy to drive the units could be obtained from nanophotovoltaic units and stored in nanosprings or nanobatteries. To go from there to nanorobots, we need nanocomputers. Drexler proposes that these could be built out of mechanical nanomachines, along the same principle as the first mechanical computers proposed by Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace to be built out of brass gears and wheels in the nineteenth century. Such machines could be programmed with punched tape or cards, and presumably nanoscopic analogs for these mechanical software devices could be found as well. Babbage's ingenious mechanical computers don't even remotely compare in capability to modern electronic ones, but the parts used by Drexler's nano–Babbage machines would be so small that enormous amounts of computing power could be contained in a microscopic speck.

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The vast horde of assemblers would then turn their attention to accomplishing some task they had been programmed to execute, such as inspect a human body for cancer cells and make appropriate adjustments, manufacture huge solar sails from asteroids, or terraform a planet. Figure 8.2. Hardware and software. Charles Babbage invented the mechanical computer. The mathematician Countess Ada Lovelace, daughter of the poet Lord Byron, realized that Babbage's computers could be programmed to act like mechanical brains. Her insight could enable self-replicating nanorobots, endowing humanity with nearly unlimited power to terraform worlds.

When Einstein Walked With Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought by Jim Holt

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, computer age, CRISPR, dark matter, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, four colour theorem, Georg Cantor, George Santayana, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Large Hadron Collider, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, luminiferous ether, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Monty Hall problem, Murray Gell-Mann, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Paradox of Choice, Paul Erdős, Peter Singer: altruism, Plato's cave, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantum entanglement, random walk, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, Skype, stakhanovite, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, union organizing, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, wage slave

Meanwhile, the pretty and flirtatious girl was besieged by suitors, who were attracted not only by her celebrity as a Byron but also by the enormous wealth she stood to inherit from her mother’s richly landed family. In 1833, at a party during her first London season, Ada was introduced to a forty-one-year-old widower named Charles Babbage. An accomplished mathematician, Babbage was also a prolific inventor of improving schemes and an all-purpose tinkerer. At the time, he was holding a series of soirees in his London home to show off something he called the Difference Engine: a mechanical calculating device, about the size of a traveling trunk, constructed of some two thousand glimmering brass and steel components—shafts, disks, gears—and powered by a hand crank.

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Through her lyrical similes—most famously, “the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves”—Ada “managed to rise above the technical minutiae of Babbage’s extraordinary invention to reveal its true grandeur.” If Ada Lovelace did not invent computer programming, is it at least fair to say that Charles Babbage invented the computer? Woolley’s biography of Ada makes much of the fact that Babbage never got his Analytical Engine built. The explanation, he argues, was not Babbage’s eccentric perfectionism or the limitations of contemporary engineering; it was that the Victorian world was simply not ready for the computer.

The End of Work by Jeremy Rifkin

banking crisis, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, blue-collar work, cashless society, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, deskilling, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, general-purpose programming language, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kaizen: continuous improvement, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, Paul Samuelson, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, prudent man rule, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, strikebreaker, technoutopianism, Thorstein Veblen, Toyota Production System, trade route, trickle-down economics, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

The philosopher and inventor muted his enthusiasm by observing that his invention "does nothing which would enable us to attribute will to it, as to the animals."12 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz augmented Pascal's feat by adding multiplication to the calculating machine's repertoire. Then, in 1821, Charles Babbage wrote a paper entitled "Observations on the Application of Machinery to the Computation of Mathematical Tables," which is still regarded as the first theoretical work on modem computation. Later, Babbage conceived of a new type of machine, an Analytical Engine, that could be programmed to solve logical or computational problems.

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Cited in Fjermedal, Grant, The Tomorrow Makers: A Brave New World of Living-Brain Machines (New York: Macmillan Publishers, 1986), p. 94. 11. Simons, Geoff, Robots: The Quest for Living Machines (New York: Sterling, 1992), pp. 52-53· 12. Pascal, Blaise, Pensees (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1932), p. 96, no. 340. 13. Babbage, Henry Prevost, Babbage's Calculating Engines (1889), Charles Babbage Institute Reprint Series for the History of Computing, vol. 2 (Los Angeles: Tomash Publishers, 1982), pp. 220-222; Bernstein, Jeremy, The Analytical Engine: Computers-Past, Present, and Future, revised ed. (New York: William Morrow, 1981), PP·47-57· 4. Augarten, Stan, Bit by Bit: An Illustrated History of Computers (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1984), p. 77; Austrian, Geoffrey D., Herman Hollerith: Forgotten Giant of Information Precessing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 312; Shurkin, Joel, Engines of the Mind: A History of the Computer (New York: W.

Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth by Stuart Ritchie

Albert Einstein, anesthesia awareness, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, Black Lives Matter, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citation needed, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, hype cycle, Kenneth Rogoff, l'esprit de l'escalier, Large Hadron Collider, meta-analysis, microbiome, Milgram experiment, mouse model, New Journalism, ocean acidification, p-value, phenotype, placebo effect, profit motive, publication bias, publish or perish, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, Thomas Bayes, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, University of East Anglia, Wayback Machine

There seems to be no study too fragmented, no hypothesis too trivial, no literature citation too biased or too egotistical, no design too warped, no methodology too bungled, no presentation of results too inaccurate, too obscure, and too contradictory, no analysis too self-serving, no argument too circular, no conclusions too trifling or too unjustified, and no grammar and syntax too offensive for a paper to end up in print.11 He was hardly the first to notice. In 1830, the mathematician and ‘father of the computer’ Charles Babbage wrote his remarkable Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, and on Some of its Causes, where he offered a taxonomy of scientific ills.12 These were ‘hoaxing’ (by those who produce fake findings which they later unmask, to prove a point), ‘forging’ (by our familiar scientific fraudsters, who have no intention of revealing their deceptions), ‘trimming’, and ‘cooking’ (both of which correspond, in our modern understanding, to p-hacking, where scientists manipulate their data and observations to give them the appearance of greater interest or accuracy).

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Richard Van Noorden, ‘Highly Cited Researcher Banned from Journal Board for Citation Abuse’, Nature 578, no. 7794 (Feb. 2020): pp. 200–201; https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-00335-7 11.  Drummond Rennie, ‘Guarding the Guardians: A Conference on Editorial Peer Review’, JAMA 256, no. 17 (7 Nov. 1986): p. 2391; https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.1986.03380170107031 12.  Charles Babbage, Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, and on Some of Its Causes (London: B. Fellowes, 1830); https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1216/1216-h/1216-h.htm 13.  International Biographical Dictionary of Computer Pioneers, ed. John A.N. Lee (Chicago, Ill.: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1995). 14.  

Clock of the Long Now by Stewart Brand

Albert Einstein, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, Danny Hillis, Eratosthenes, Extropian, fault tolerance, George Santayana, Herman Kahn, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, life extension, longitudinal study, low earth orbit, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, nuclear winter, pensions crisis, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Metcalfe, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog

Horologists became obsessed with accurately measuring millionths and then billionths of a second. Hillis headed in the opposite direction. The Clock’s computer is shockingly subtle and simple. As Hillis says, “It’s a design Babbage could have succeeded with. A skilled clockmaker could have built one in the fifteenth century.” (Charles Babbage’s celebrated mid-nineteenth-century mechanical computer, built of brass, failed in part because it used decimal notation. Hillis’s mechanical computer is binary.) The subtlety comes with the extreme accuracy that digital computation allows. A calculation thirty-two bits deep is accurate to one in seven million—one day in twenty thousand years.

Victorian Internet by Tom Standage

British Empire, Charles Babbage, disinformation, financial independence, global village, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Jacquard loom, paper trading, pneumatic tube, QWERTY keyboard, technoutopianism, undersea cable

This classic example shows that no matter how secure a code is, a person is always the weakest link in the chain. Even so, there were continuous efforts to dream up un-crackable codes for use over the telegraph. crYPTOGRAPHY—tinkering with codes and ciphers—was a common hobby among Victorian gentlemen. Wheatstone and his friend Charles Bab-bage, who is best known for his failed attempts to build a mechanical computer, were both keen crackers of codes and ciphers—Victorian hackers, in effect. "Deciphering is, in my opinion, one of the most fascinating of arts," Bab-bage wrote in his autobiography, "and I fear I have wasted upon it more time than it deserves."

Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life by Daniel C. Dennett

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, assortative mating, buy low sell high, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, finite state, Garrett Hardin, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, junk bonds, language acquisition, Murray Gell-Mann, New Journalism, non-fiction novel, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Turing test

It is quite explicit, of course, in the Argument from Design, which invites the observer to marvel at the cunning interplay of parts, the elegant planning and exquisite workmanship of the Artificer. But engineering has always had second-class status in the intellectual world. From Leonardo da Vinci to Charles Babbage to Thomas Edison, the engineering genius has always been acclaimed but nevertheless regarded with a certain measure of condescension by the mandarin elite of science and the arts. Aristotle did not help matters by proposing a distinction, adopted by the medievals, between what was secundum naturam, according to nature, and what was contra naturam, against nature, artificial.

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Whereas Skinner's simple parts had been randomly mated stimulus-response pairings that could then be subjected, over and over again, to the selection pressure of reinforcement from the environment, Turing's simple parts were internal data-structures — different "machine states" that could be composed to respond differentially to indefinitely many different inputs, creating input output behavior of any imaginable sophistication. Which of these internal states were innately specified and which were to be revised by experience was something left to be investigated. Like Charles Babbage (see note 13 of chapter 8), Turing saw that the behavior of an entity need not be any simple function of its own history of stimulation, since it could have accrued huge amounts of design over the eons, which would permit it to use its internal complexity to mediate its responses. That abstract opening was eventually filled by GOFAI-modelers with contrivances of dazzling complexity that still fell comically short of producing human-style cognition.

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Haldane, had shown him), and for years he was convinced that "my fingers must be Turing waves; my vertebrae must be Turing waves" — but he eventually came to realize, reluctantly, that it could not be that simple and beautiful. 13. In fact, the bridge between computers and evolution goes back even farther, to Charles Babbage, whose 1834 conception of the "Difference Engine" is generally credited with inaugurating the prehistory of the computer. Babbage's notorious Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (1838) exploited his theoretical model of a computing engine to offer a mathematical proof that God had in effect programmed nature to generate the species!

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century by P. W. Singer

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, cuban missile crisis, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, friendly fire, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, Google Earth, Grace Hopper, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, junk bonds, Law of Accelerating Returns, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Neal Stephenson, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, no-fly zone, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, private military company, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wisdom of Crowds, Timothy McVeigh, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, world market for maybe five computers, Yogi Berra

pg=2&topic=robots&topic_set=. 45 the field of modern chemistry J. Boone Bartholomees Jr., “The Heirs of Archimedes: Science and the Art of War through the Age of Enlightenment,” Parameters 35, no. 4 (2005): 136. 46 “to see what would happen” “Charles Babbage,” Wikipedia, April 20, 2007 (cited April 20, 2007); available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage. 46 “I called an official” Robert Finkelstein, “Military Robotics: Malignant Machines or the Path to Peace,” paper presented at the Military Robotics Conference, Institute for Defense and Government Advancement, Washington, DC, April 10-12, 2006. 47 the Germans protected their coast Steven M.

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Charles de Colmar is credited with inventing the first mechanical calculator, which he called the Arithmometer, in 1820. The machine was as big as a desk. His first customers were the French and British militaries, which used it for navigation and plotting the trajectory of cannonballs. Similarly, the Royal Navy hired Charles Babbage, the man generally credited with designing the first programmable computer. Babbage’s 1822 machine, called a “difference engine,” was designed of some twenty-five thousand parts. In a foretaste of the innovators of today, Babbage was also a bit of an oddball. He once baked himself in an oven for four minutes, just “to see what would happen.”

The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future by Jeff Booth

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate raider, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, deep learning, DeepMind, deliberate practice, digital twin, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, hype cycle, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, late fees, low interest rates, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, Milgram experiment, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, OpenAI, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, software as a service, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, zero-sum game

The more information there is, the more correction it needs—but the same exponential growth of technology that allows this explosion of information also allows exponentially improved error correction: a sonic boom of information and knowledge, with our computers getting further and further ahead of us. The beginning of AI Try to imagine yourself living in the early to mid-1800s: horse-drawn carriages, no telephones, before the electrification of cities. It is hard to even comprehend that the designs for a modern-day computer could be envisioned then, but Charles Babbage (1791–1871), a British polymath, did just that. Babbage found errors while reviewing astronomical tables that were calculated by hand, and he realized that computational problems were dangerous to navigation. So, he devised a solution and created the first blueprint for a mechanical-based computation.

Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World by Joshua B. Freeman

anti-communist, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, corporate raider, cotton gin, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, joint-stock company, knowledge worker, mass immigration, means of production, mittelstand, Naomi Klein, new economy, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

And even then, what by the standards of the day could be considered very large factories—mills employing over a thousand employees—were the exception, not the rule, in both urban and rural settings.25 But the very large mills received a disproportionate amount of attention, both at the time and since, because they were seen as the cutting edge of not only industry and technology but also of social arrangements.26 Why did the owners of these facilities choose to go big, to adopt the large, centralized factory model? Charles Babbage, the great English mathematician and inventor, devoted a whole chapter “On the Causes and Consequences of Large Factories” in his influential 1832 book, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufacturers. Babbage began with the obvious, that the introduction of machinery tended to lead to greater production volume, resulting in “the establishment of large factories.”

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Gatrell, “Labour, Power, and the Size of Firms in Lancashire Cotton in the Second Quarter of the Nineteenth Century,” Economic History Review, new series, vol. 30, no. 1 (Feb. 1977), 96, 98, 112; Jenkins, “Introduction,” xv. 26.Berg, Age of Manufactures, 23–24; Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 208–11; Robert Gray, The Factory Question and Industrial England, 1830–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3–4. 27.Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufacturers, 4th ed. (London: Charles Knight, 1835), 211–23. 28.Gatrell, “Labour, Power, and the Size of Firms,” 96–97, 108; Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics (1890; London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1920), 8th ed., IV.XI.7, http://www.econlib.org/library/Marshall/marP25.html#Bk.IV,Ch.XI. 29.Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture, 184–85. 30.Landes, Unbound Prometheus, 41; Jones, “Technology, Transaction Costs, and the Transition to Factory Production,” 71–74; Jenkins, “Introduction,” xiii; Berg, Age of Manufactures, 23–24, 190, 246; Hudson, Genesis of Industrial Capital, 70–71.

Big Bang by Simon Singh

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Astronomia nova, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Brownian motion, carbon-based life, Cepheid variable, Chance favours the prepared mind, Charles Babbage, Commentariolus, Copley Medal, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, Dava Sobel, Defenestration of Prague, discovery of penicillin, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Erwin Freundlich, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, fudge factor, Hans Lippershey, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, horn antenna, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Index librorum prohibitorum, information security, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Karl Jansky, Kickstarter, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Murray Gell-Mann, music of the spheres, Olbers’ paradox, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Paul Erdős, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, scientific mainstream, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time dilation, unbiased observer, Wilhelm Olbers, William of Occam

Chapter 3 THE GREAT DEBATE The known is finite, the unknown is infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land. T.H. HUXLEY The less one knows about the universe, the easier it is to explain. LEON BRUNSCHVICG Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all. CHARLES BABBAGE Theories crumble, but good observations never fade. HARLOW SHAPLEY First, get the facts, then you can distort them at your leisure. MARK TWAIN Heaven wheels above you displaying to you her eternal glories and still your eyes are on the ground. DANTE Science consists of two complementary strands, theory and experiment.

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The Fifth Miracle Paul Davies How did life get started? Davies looks at the latest ideas and breakthroughs. Strange Beauty George Johnson A highly readable biography of Murray Gell-Mann, one of the great physicists of the twentieth century. The Cogwheel Brain Doron Swade The heroic tale of Charles Babbage, a Victorian genius who tried to build a mechanical computer. Find Out More Websites selected by Simon Singh http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/m_uni.html This NASA website offers a tutorial, Cosmology 101, that covers everything from the development of the core Big Bang model to the latest ideas and observations.

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

De Prony duly constructed a method for dividing up the cognitive work associated with computing logarithms, known as the difference method, and mobilized the labor of recently unemployed (and therefore inexpensive) hairdressers (whose aristocratic patrons had been lucky to escape the recent revolution with their heads intact, much less their fancy hairstyles). This was perhaps the first industrial-era information factory, but it was a harbinger of subsequent developments to come.36 Several decades after de Prony, the English mathematician and astronomer Charles Babbage, faced with a similar need to quickly and efficiently generate large numbers of mathematical tables, also turned to contemporary industrial manufacturing practices. After making an extended tour of European industrial centers, he published On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, the most comprehensive study of industrialization to date.

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I am not aware of much sober scholarship on this particular transition from East Coast government to Silicon Valley private business, although much of the dated rhetoric that pits state against corporations can be found in popular accounts, such as Michael Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (New York: Harper Business, 1999), and L. Gordon Crovitz, “Who Really Invented the Internet?” Wall Street Journal (July 22, 2012), https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390444464304577539063008406518. 28. Judy O’Neill, “Interview with Paul Baran,” Charles Babbage Institute, OH 182 (February 5, 1999), Menlo Park, CA, accessed September 15, 2017, http://www.gtnoise.net/classes/cs7001/fall_2008/readings/baran-int.pdf. 29. Tara Abraham, Rebel Genius: Warren S. McCulloch’s Transdisciplinary Life in Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016). 30. Stewart Brand, “Founding Father,” Wired 9, no. 3 (1991), http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/9.03/baran_pr.html. 31.

Fewer, Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects by Glenn Adamson

big-box store, Biosphere 2, blood diamond, blue-collar work, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, dumpster diving, fake news, Ford Model T, haute couture, informal economy, Jacquard loom, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kintsugi, Mason jar, post-truth, race to the bottom, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, trade route, VTOL, white flight

Nifty as a fretsaw is, it cannot compare to the complexity of such a machine, which interweaves warp and weft threads into textile. The point is often made by textile specialists that the loom was the direct historical predecessor of the computer. This is true in two senses: first, in that the earliest computer designer, the British mechanical engineer Charles Babbage, employed the same kind of punch cards in his so-called Analytical Engine as those that were used to program Jacquard looms; and second, in the more general sense that a loom, like a computer, is a machine for storing and executing very complex patterns, expressed in binary (on/off). Like any tool, but to a very advanced degree, a programmable loom is a repository for human know-how.

Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression by Geoff Cox, Alex McLean

4chan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, bash_history, bitcoin, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, finite state, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Conference 1984, Ian Bogost, Jacques de Vaucanson, language acquisition, Larry Wall, late capitalism, means of production, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, packet switching, peer-to-peer, power law, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Slavoj Žižek, social software, social web, software studies, speech recognition, SQL injection, stem cell, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, The Nature of the Firm, Turing machine, Turing test, Vilfredo Pareto, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

In other words, there is a feedback loop that describes the way the historical subject can reassemble itself or self-organize, in the passage from in-itself to for-itself. Computation What does an understanding of computational processes further contribute to this understanding of the relations between speech and code, if there is a recognition that the historical subject can both program and be programmed? In a history of computing, for instance, Charles Babbage’s “Analytical Engine” (first described in 1837) extended the earlier “Difference Engine” (first conceived in 1786) by employing the principle of the “strange loop” or “tangled hierarchy,” a mathematical theory describing the capability of a computer to alter its own stored program.21 This logic is taken to an extreme in the case of code that is self-referential or recursive, such as a “quine,” a term used to describe a program whose output is exactly the same as its complete 44 Chapter 2 source code.

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know by Richard Watson

23andMe, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, Charles Babbage, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, computer age, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, dematerialisation, Dennis Tito, digital Maoism, digital map, digital nomad, driverless car, Elon Musk, energy security, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, gamification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, hive mind, hydrogen economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Shuttleworth, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peak oil, personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Florida, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, smart transportation, space junk, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, telepresence, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Turing test, urban decay, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, young professional

We will have more machines and algorithms that talk with each other and our most important concern will be trying to explain to machines what it means to be human. the condensed idea Next-stage computing timeline c. 100 BC Antikythera mechanism (early analog mechanical computer) 1837 Charles Babbage describes analytical engine 2015 Direct brain-to-machine computer interfaces 2020 Computer games beamed to the human brain 2025 Computers injected into the human body 2040 Human beings no longer need to remember anything 2050 Internet-enabled telepathy 2070 People able to record and share dreams 18 Nanotechnology This is the science of manipulating matter at an atomic or subatomic scale (1–100 nanometers) to create supersmart materials with entirely new properties or to manufacture objects at an atomically precise level.

Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey by Rachel Hewitt

British Empire, Charles Babbage, Copley Medal, Dava Sobel, digital map, Fellow of the Royal Society, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, land reform, late capitalism, lone genius, Mikhail Gorbachev, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Republic of Letters, side project, South Sea Bubble, Suez canal 1869, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

A sketch showing the Ordnance Survey’s measurement of the Lough Foyle baseline with the compensation bars. The measurement of the Lough Foyle baseline, like that in Britain on Hounslow Heath, attracted many interested parties, including the British astronomer John Herschel, the eccentric mathematician Charles Babbage and the director of the Armagh Observatory, Thomas Romney Robinson. If the surveyors sometimes felt embattled during their time mapping the Irish landscape, Colby and Larcom’s experiences at Lough Foyle reassured them that, among the Protestant scientific community at least, they were extremely welcome in Ireland.

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The Templemore memoir was relatively popular among readers and sold 1250 copies in the space of six years (Wordsworth bought one), but its exorbitant production costs meant that the memoir project’s days were numbered. Colby and Larcom’s brainchild had, in fact, been deeply flawed from the start. The military engineers found it extremely tricky to make time for both surveying and memoir research. At the British Association’s Dublin meeting, the mathematician Charles Babbage had optimistically claimed that the memoir work could be conducted ‘in the evening’ after a full day’s map-making, but this was ludicrous: both tasks were full-time jobs in themselves. Even more problematically, the map-makers were not trained in anthropological research methods. The quality of their investigations was inconsistent and their discoveries were occasionally ‘manifestly wrong’, as John O’Donovan put it.

More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionised the Cosmos by Dava Sobel

Astronomia nova, Charles Babbage, Commentariolus, dark matter, Dava Sobel, Edmond Halley, invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres

After Newton established universal gravitation as the force that kept the planets in their orbits around the Sun, copies of Copernicus’s book came into the possession of many other giants in astronomy, such as comet namesake Edmond Halley, his successor as astronomer royal George Biddell Airy, computing pioneer Charles Babbage, and twentieth-century cosmologist Edwin Hubble, who was first to appreciate the infinite extent and continuing expansion of the universe. Now that Copernicus’s text no longer serves to describe the known paths of the planets, it is more highly valued than ever as an icon. The most recent copy of the book offered at auction—a clean, unannotated first edition—sold at Christie’s, New York, in June 2008 (to an undisclosed recipient) for $2,210,500.

Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929 by Markus Krajewski, Peter Krapp

Apollo 11, business process, Charles Babbage, continuation of politics by other means, double entry bookkeeping, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gödel, Escher, Bach, index card, Index librorum prohibitorum, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jacques de Vaucanson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge worker, means of production, new economy, paper trading, Turing machine, work culture

The same author secures her place as distributor of the American office reform movement in Germany, for instance with Witte 1930. 8. Haußmann 1925, p. 4. 9. Roth-Seefrid 1918, p. 18. 10. Ostwald 1929, p. 232. 11. Popp 1932, p. 10. 12. Schlesinger 1920, pp. 21f. Motion study has a longer tradition and was certainly not Taylor’s invention. Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Prussian generals, and Charles Babbage had already conducted studies to optimize motion sequences; see Burchardt 1977, p. 57. 13. For their pioneering role, see Yates 1989. 14. Giebichenstein 1929, p. 26. For the conceptual history of “rationalization,” see Hinnenthal 1927; and in relation to the watchword “efficiency,” see also Berg 1929. 15.

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine by Peter Lunenfeld

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, anti-globalists, Apple II, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, business logic, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, East Village, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, folksonomy, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, gravity well, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, Mother of all demos, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-materialism, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, social bookmarking, social software, spaced repetition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas L Friedman, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, walkable city, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Bush in particular wanted to use the new technologies to improve our capacity to process and understand information.5 In “As We May Think,” an article published in the Atlantic Monthly just after the war ended in 1945, Bush wrote about an imaginary machine that he called the Memex, which simulated the human brain’s capacities for associative thinking.6 Bush’s article remains an amazing read all these years later. It offers a capsule history of computing, or rather precomputing, discussing Gottfried Leibniz’s mechanical calculators and Charles Babbage’s difference engine, and explores information overload (remember this was 1945), imagining a fully multimediated “future investigator” wearing recording technologies that date, time stamp, and synchronize both research findings and observations. But it was Bush’s detailed description of the Memex—short for “memory extender”—that serves as an original meme for the computer as culture machine.

Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing by Adam Greenfield

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, augmented reality, business process, Charles Babbage, defense in depth, demand response, demographic transition, facts on the ground, game design, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, James Dyson, knowledge worker, late capitalism, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, new economy, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pattern recognition, profit motive, QR code, recommendation engine, RFID, seminal paper, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, value engineering

The following are some of the factors that are actively inhibiting either the development or the chances for adoption of ubiquitous computing. Thesis 55 The necessary standards for interoperability do not exist or are not yet widely observed. A lack of widely observed standards in the dimensions of screw threading inhibited Charles Babbage in his quest to build the Difference Engine, the world's first computer, in the 1840s. A lack of standards in languages and operating systems kept electronic computers from communicating with each other for decades. Well into the era of the personal computer, a lack of standards kept software development balkanized.