Wired presents a “steampunk unboxing” as a Difference Engine Arrives in Silicon Valley:
When Charles Babbage invented a massive calculating machine in 1849, he probably didn’t count on the 150 years it would take to actually get the thing built.Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 2 was a precursor of modern computers, capable of performing complex mathematical calculations with 31 digits of precision, all using Victorian-era rods, gears, levers and linkages.
But Babbage never completed it. It took engineers and curators at London’s Science Museum almost six years of work to bring Babbage’s 20 pages of blueprints to life in 1991.
Now, thanks to Microsoft multimillionaire Nathan Myhrvold, a second Difference Engine has been built and delivered to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, where trained docents will turn its brass handle to crank out the calculations Babbage dreamed of automating.
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After losing the backing of the British government, Babbage continued work on an even more sophisticated device, an Analytic Engine, which would have been a true computer, capable of executing programs with conditional sequences, loops, computations and registers for stored data. It, too, was never built. Babbage died in 1871, an embittered and disappointed man, and the London Times ridiculed him in its obituary.As a result of Babbage’s failure, his influence on computing history has been negligible. It took more than 100 years before anyone would again build a true computer, using electrical systems instead of mechanical ones.