A demo of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine
Вставка
- Опубліковано 26 вер 2024
- Charles Babbage designed one of the first computers but never lived to see it built. Here's a demo of one of the two in the world that work. This one is at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, USA, and here they fire it up (well, crank it up) and explain a bit about it. www.computerhis...
The folks standing around are pioneers too. They are people who built and used the Plato system (there was a conference going about Plato, which was a social media system used in the 1970s).
Just think: one man thought of every single piece of this machine.
Not only is it a work of art, but it can calculate complex math problems. And it can never get them wrong. Before this, there were no computers.
He had NOTHING to go off of. That's what I call a genius.
not to mention that the tools available to him at the time weren't precise enough to make what he wanted, so he made his own lmao
Well , mechanical calculators existed before this , babbage built upon those ,
But still , he whent from a calculator that could do addition and multiplication ,
To this ...
Well don't forget this machine was only perform calculations, until Ada Lovelace introduced that calculation can be Application if you set rules known as algorithm
There were some computing machines, some of them as old as ancient times, but they weren't so advanced or programmable, and they didn't have a printer.
Like Sikorsky, Tesla.
What a concept for 1830! What genius to design such a machine! I take my hat off to Charles Babbage.
When I did Computer Science at A-Level (UK) in 1968-1970 (I passed!) part of the curriculum was on Numerical Methods including Finite Differences which is EXACTLY what this machine does. We also used a standard, desktop, hand cranked calculator to perform the additions and subtractions (very similar to what happens with this machine but involving quite a few more steps). I have seen the original in operation at the London Science Museum. This video demo was excellent & very clear.
Wow
Imagine what this man could have done if he lived 100 years later. Amazing.
may be lost in social media like tiktok facebook and twitter,
@@yusufjiruwalalol yes
@@yusufjiruwala they had TikTok, Facebook and Twitter in 1930?
@@collisw8302lol
I must be the luckiest guy in the century. This is a real treat to have an opportunity to see this.
How interesting. I did not know seeing a UA-cam video about an old calculator could possibly make somebody feel like the luckiest guy of the century.
AGFuzzyPancake Think of the money he saved viewing it on UA-cam vrs seeing it in actual operation in London and Mountain view Ca. I'm sure you have been to both locations to view it by your reply.
I think you and I can agree that viewing a *public* video on UA-cam about a mechanical calculator does not make one "lucky" by any definition.
wait till you see porn, dude
AGFuzzyPancake Except perhaps by the definition of lucky meaning that the sequence of possibilities led this person to a beneficial or pleasurable result. In this case, that would be a video which he had an overwhelmingly small chance to come across, but thoroughly enjoyed. Sounds lucky to me, but what do I know?
Industrial age machines were beautiful.. steam engines were stunning to look at and watch run..everything made was built to last and look as beautiful as possible.. I wish Babbage and ava got to see their idea in action.. it's a masterpiece 💯
Thank you for posting this. I've been aware of the Babbage Engine for 30 years, but could never understand its function nor purpose. Brilliant presentation.
Julie is the clock´s machine. She provides manual clock speed to the CPU.
Correct and the clock speed is 1/8 of a Htz 😄👍
@@itisimatadvc And the CPU is overclocked!
imagine a water cooler for overheating
@@rapidkiss that entirely depends on how much caffeine you give Julie.
Doubt she's even born in July.
He would have been very happy if he were alive today to see descendants of his machine are inside hands of almost everyone in the world.
+Jeong-hun Sin Ada Lovelace would've been happy too (happier?) because she saw that computers can be used for things other than maths and Babbage only saw it as a mathematical tool
i didn't say she would have, but she realised the engine could do more than mathematical tables, and he never did. this is more her future (where computers are mostly used for things other than purely mathematical things) than his future (where computers are only used for mathematical tables).
But at least when you crank out a mathematical table, it does not contain paid advertisements based on your recorded previous uses of the difference engine.
lol
They're actually quite different.. It's a decimal machine not a binary electronic computer but some terminology and ideas like memory remain the same
Wow I really want to see it someday
wow, not just a machine put a piece of art. Cool to see the process of discretization visualized at 15:38 really beautiful and the essence of computing.
It is also significant as an embodiment of the degree of skill and applied effort possible in the early nineteenth century Industrial Revolution. The Engine thus serves as an aesthetic and engineering artifact.of great importance,
Starfield brought me here and boy is this incredible! I had never heard of this AMAZING invention! Kudos to Mr. Babbage!
It took Babbage 37 years to complete this machine, impressive.
Pity the audience didn't give them some applause. Really fascinating history of Babbage and the difference engine.
That is NOT the purpose of the Difference Engine. Its purpose (as was explained in the video) is to produce large tables of results for complex 5th order polynomials and NOT to act as a modern scientific general purpose calculator. THAT work would have been more the purview of the Analytical Engine which would have still required some programming albeit the plan as evinced by Ada Lovelace (also stated in the video) would have been to hold such programs on punched cards.
True
How in the absolute fuck did one man imagine that entire thing, with basically nothing to go off of!?
In discrete pieces, my friend. Solving one problem mechanically creates more problems to solve ahead of it, and then sometimes the design of something ahead requires that things behind need a revision leading to redesigns throughout.
An EMP won't take that out...
But we can through a wrench inside and get the machine jammed stuck.
@Rotten Brainz
Damn fucking straight
Use a Faraday cage for your electronics.
𝙂𝙤𝙤𝙙
Jam a rench through a modern circuit bored; if anything the modern is more fragile to tench interference.
Holy crap what a piece of equipment. From a machinist point of view this stuff was machined on basic equipment. My hats off to them, excellent tradesmen.
They were not able to build it in the 19th century for this reason. By the time this project started (1990s), they most certainly used CNC machining to fabricate the parts.
Now imagine this being the lock for an entire vault with there being over 50 thousand possible combinations due to the many algorithmic components with only 10 numerals on each... Since 0 exists it can lead to many more combinations as it is added and constantly used for more numerals beyond 10.
An excellent presentation about the remarkable Charles Babbage.
Wow, what a nice design. Pipelining the execution and everything, he tought of allot of things back then which werent even invisioned yet.
A bright man.
Nice demo too, thanks for uploading !
17:24 its amazing that one of the cornerstones of modern computing exists in this thing - energy management
I know what you mean, but in one way or another, to one degree or another, energy management is important to basically everything.
Julie do the thing
CaptainLeviathan very mst3k of you!😆
Here Zhu Li was Ada Lovelace!
Have read about differential engine and analytical engine during first year of engineering and had seen them in pics only. While watching this video seeing these engines working I feel fascinated and the moment is really mesmerising with feel of gratitude for the Charles Babbage whose genius always inspired me. Earth has been made beautiful by great souls.
Fantastic demo! So crazy that he envisioned that whole thing.
That is a beautiful machine! To get the parts custom crafted must have been a hell of a project. Almost makes me want to attempt to 3d print this haha.
That machine is unimaginably beautiful!
Obrigado Charles Babbage por nos deixar essa relíquia para a evolução da humanidade.
This absolutely magnificent, thank you!
Thank you so much for this video! It's one of my dreams to visit the Computer History Museum!
If you don't understand (or want to) engineering and maths then just blithely drive your car, cross bridges, ascend office buildings, navigate oceans and fly the skies without even thinking about the fundamentals involved. ALL those things are dependent on the type of equations that this machine can solve. Those solutions saved engineers tens of thousands of hours of otherwise tedious (error-prone) calculations & without which men would never have landed on & returned safely from the the moon!
Thank you for sharing. So helpful. I have been looking for a good explanation for days, this is the best one.
What an amazing piece of mechanical ingenuity!
when u think much, more, much, than gutenberg`s machine. WOW
A great description. One of the best on youtube.
Looks to me like there's space in the printing mechanism for one of the carbon paper ribbons that they used in 1980s "mess-free" mechanical printers. That would let them demonstrate the printing without dirtying up their machine.
Babbage and Lovelace - what a team.
What a beautiful observation by charles babbage
forget gigahertz the future resides in JulieHertz.
Good one, hehe :D
It is hard to understand his creations more than two centuries later. Makes me wonder if the difference between me and him though we're both humans, is almost at the species level. This guy was something else. Damn!
Babbage created the class definition of the difference engine. But he defined an abstract class, which could not be instantiated until someone overrode his class definition with a subclass containing methods for creating precise mechanical parts. The class also had to be instantiated on a platform that could execute the constructor function without throwing an InsufficientFunding exception.
I see what you did there. Because he hardly ever completed anything but templates and schematics, and eventually lost his funding because of it :)
This wins the Object-Oriented Comment award for 2017!
Fred
wow. what a beautiful machine, or computer! it’s a truly amazing piece of machinery
I just today saw the real diffrence engine 1 at the science museum in London. They have version of number 2 like this which was built by the science
museum.
At 5:00 - "...this is chutzpah..." Love it. "Chutzpah" is Yiddish for "bold", "brash", or "ballsy" (i'm american irish-english, btw... pagnostic / recovering ex-catholic)
I saw this in person, and it is impressive. Being a mechanic, I would hate to have to maintain it. :) Needs lots of oiling apparently.
Reflection below it in what appears to be a tray may indicate an oil catch pan.
Thank you for the video. I've been to the museum but was unable to see a demonstration of the machine.
Real genius. Respect to babage and lovelace
Fascinating! Thanks for posting! 😊
The dude was clearly well ahead of his time. If the government back then supported him, the Victorian era could have had its own steam-powered information age lol.
Now we have extremely advanced computing devices that fit on the palm of our hands. And all most people use it for is to take selfies and show what they had for breakfast or lunch to the world lol.
The machine would likely have to run faster than the speed of light to accomplish this. If the handle on the crank moves 1/10th of a meter every rotation at 3.8 GHz, the outer part of the handle would be traveling (.1 X 3,800,000,000 meters) or 380,000,000 meters per second. The speed of light is 299 792 458 m/s.
great , thank you for uploading the video
thank you ... A treat to see this.
The way I look at this is that the application wouldn’t have been science but ballistics. These would be used as fire control computers to calculate the fall of shot
Charles Babage Not Only Father of Computers A God Of Computors creating The Difference engine He Is a pure genius
They said base 10 because base 2 would have taken much taller columns. I wonder what would happen if it had been designed with Base 16? Of course there would then have to be a base to base conversion unit.
Great presentation!
Amazing to see difference engines at work.
imagine building that big machine like wtf bro, pretty impresive
15:30 to see it in action
Great presentation thanks for this. It was a great summary of the man and machine to make us investigate further.
Incredible thanks for sharing!
Imagine, being able to imagine such a machine....
I can just imagine how pissed off Charles Babbage had to be while explaining this at his Saturday Night parties while the guest just wanted to watch his dancing toy robot
The first computer was invented in 1623 and it could calculate numbers until 999.999. The inventor was the German Wilhelm Schickard, a friend of the famous astronomer Johannes Kepler.
Nope. They are much older.
What an amazing thing his idea was turned into.
I am form brazil, very good images...I love history of computers.
Dude , That proved to be Informative,in my search for the "History of Computers" ;)
Imagine if Babbage knew about binary number. He might have simplified the engine and completed the analytical engine.
Anything called an “engine” is fine by me. What an incredible device!
what a great demo! the host and Julie is awesome!
شكراً لكم.
Thank they.
Charles Savage
Carnegie said, 'Pioneering don't PAY'!
The late 70's: I bought my first CALCULATOR (From Mr Sinclair.- cost a week's wages! - didn't do Sq. Roots!)
I discarded my slide rule (Bought a few years earlier, getting to Log Logs, on Credit!)
My Brain said, 'Thank you very much', and retired!
An Abacus can do the same thing in almost the same time, withoutany Dunbing Down!
my study buddy bought HP`s ... programmable handheld calculator. a month wages equivalent, you`re right. than St Jobs sold St.W`s HP to start this apple wonder, as he said.
Who on earth would made the Antikythera Mechanism? They seem to be similar devices mechanically.
That one was apparently (from the parts that survived the time in water) used to calculated astronimocal events, mainly lunar and solar eclipses. Quite a different purpose.
I think Mr Babbage would fit right into this era.
Some people say Julie, the lady in the red shirt, is cranky. ;-)
Nicely played!
I bet her arms are strong if she does that 10 times a day.
Thanks for inventing computers
Good old days when people used to keep mobile in belt holder
My dad kept his mobile in a hip holster and it made him feel like a rootin-tootin cowboy with the fastest phone draw in the west... he could draw and answer his phone halfway through the first ring, and he was proud of it!
he has given amazing idea to the world
Jaw dropping! Talk about ahead of your time
What is not generally known. Is Charles Babbage worked for the British Government at one time . Cracking foreign government codes . The codes used at that time, where thought to be impossible to read ; but Babbage did it !
I thought that was Turing?
@@SyemaAilia Babbage too, much earlier - IIRC it was the Vigenere cipher that he cracked.
Thank you Mr Scoble. Hope to see you back on TWIT someday.
Amazing Machine!
Looks amazing at 15:35
This is superb machine.. First the interesting thing in this machine that the Charles taking idea of Analytic computer. This think of Sir Charles Babbage was create in the mind. I only can say this think is given from God. I really very Impress when i read about the Charles Babbage. Charles Babbage i pray for you that you live every where of the world you only happy. I love You Charles Babbage. I sloth you with the deepness from own heart....
I ran across this old patent 3190554 where the logic gates run on compressed air instead of electricity. Was this computer ever built and used for something? Could such a computer be built today using a 3D printer? If Babbage had gone the compressed air approach could he have gained the help of London's organ grinders in the building of his difference engine? I read that Babbage and the organ grinders were bitter enemies.
Some air driven logic was used in machinery IIRC
What's IIRC ? sounds cool. I was thinking that some tech high school kids can get together and make one as a 3D project and of course You Tube it so slobs like me can get a peek at this old tech running. New tech making old tech for teaching the young. Neat!
If I remember correctly.. I seem to remember some air driven sequencing and interlocks. A hydraulic logic system might be doable, but air is way too compressible for more than a small handful of logic elements.
I can remember only one Russian video about old Soviet toy constructor which really is just a bunch of compressed air powered logic elements. Search by the name "Пневмоника и процессор постапокалипсиса"
You think this is amazing? Now think again about our fabulous technology that enables us to watch this video
Electricity is the work of the devil.
Sir, I know next to nothing about mathematics, but it seems to me that Mr. Babbage would and could have made a larger contribution to mankind at his early date by simply constructing a general purpose calculator. His Difference Engine might be useful for calculating trajectories, but how would that be helpful in day to day life? Thanks for the video, I think I learned a lot.
ZeekWolfe1 not really if hed completed it would have allowed more complex maths allowing for more complex physics
ZeekWolfe1: Its main purpose was to calculate and print error-free nautical tables for navigation. Those produced at that time were so fraught with errors as to pose a real danger to ships that had to use them to know where they were, accurately enough to avoid hazards at sea. So this would have greatly helped in avoiding a lot of mishaps, even disasters, in commercial & other shipping. That was the Crown's interest in funding the project.
Fred
Revolutionary machine
The new Ipad looks really promising
Wish the camera person would stand still, maybe use a tripod. But great information though, and great this machine exists.
What a beauty
8:15 *”…But it was a good mental exercise”*😂😂
I wonder what RPM the crank would need to be at to make it as fast as a pentium CPU. It could be done perhaps with a nascar engine and some gearing.
i remember thinking that this was a time machine when i was a 6 year old lol
This reminds me of assembler language.
I'm pretty sure Charles never visited StackOverflow, and yet he was able to design this magnificent machine... shame on all of us.
The way 1:38 it's moving looks like a door opening in video games 🤣👌 but damn, He designed all of this respect man respect
I wonder if world history would have changed if babagge would have built his machines.
Also its funny we still call computers, computers seeing how majority of the ppl do not use them for math.
a computer is still doing maths even if that is now what the user is trying to do
Simply Amazing!
Great video! Thanks for sharing!