The World's First True Computer Still Hasn't Been Built
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- Опубліковано 27 вер 2024
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The code cracking machines of the 1940’s are often referred to as the first computers, but they could not have been developed without the intricate machines that predated them by almost a hundred years, but were forgotten about for a century.
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Sources:
Computer: A History of the Information Machine (Martin Campbell-Kelly, William Aspray, Nathan Ensmenger, Jeffrey R.Yost, 3rd edition, 2013)www.britannica... Sources:commons.wikime...
en.wikipedia.o...
The Steampunk Computers of the 1800s
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There's an active project to study Babbage's work and potentially construct a working analytical engine called "Plan28"
What happened to the other 27 plans?
I wonder if you guys have done a video on microfluidic computers. If I remember correctly, they're a kind of hydraulic computer that used hydraulic switches in leu of transistors.
@@terrafirma9328 - Babbage's "Plan 28" is believed by the researchers to be his most complete and advanced design. Presumably Plan 27 couldn't run Crysis.
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The Difference Engine is kind of the source of "Steam Punk". In 1990 William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, two of the most influential author of the cyberpunk genre, wrote a novel named after Babbage's machine, that envision a victorian era where his machine was widely adopted, transponding some of their cyberpunk tropes onto a steam-powered world. This became, along with a few other books (like Tim Power's "Anubis Gate") became the foundation of the Steampunk genre. in a way calling the Analytical engine a steam-punk computer is a bit weird because without it steapunk might not exist, or at least be wide spread idea that it is today.
So William Gibson is not only responsible for Cyberpunk and the Matrix but also Steampunk? What a lad
Also while the Difference Engine never really came to fruition fully mechanical and electromechanical calculators like the Comptometer, arithmometer, and pinwheel calculator were in common use well up until the 1970s. Chris Staecker has videos demonstrating a bunch of these devices, and they were fully capable of performing advanced mathematics just as quickly if not quicker than the first generation of digital calculators, with some of them even including mechanisms to prevent user errors. We shouldn't be selling them short.
The differential in cars and trucks that allow vehicles to go smoothly around corners, uses a gear set from Babbage 's engine. You can't calculate "pie" on it, but you can go smoothly around corners.
@@manifatzigula "Steampunk" is a play on "cyberpunk", but was coined by KW Jeter by 1987 to describe work by himself, Powers, and James Blaylock over the previous decade.
_The Anubis Gates_ was published in 1983.
Ohhhh that's where I recognized the name from!!!
Often overlooked is Babbage's real contribution: The first out of control computer project.
Really, the first computer project was the first out of control computer project. Babbage was a trend setter in many ways.
and that my friends is how we invented the word 'scope'.
I wish I could like this twice
"Huh, I can do some tweaks to this design from my first project and turn it into a much more powerful computer! I can probably even get it done in the next few years!"
Ah yes, the infamous feature creap.
While Babbage had a massive setback when a prototype, which was to be shown to government representatives, was destroyed in a huge fire (which also took out many of his schematics & specialised dies for manufacturing parts), his biggest flaw (throughout his lifetime) was *_Scope Creep,_* as his brilliant mind constantly kept tweaking parts, even as they were getting built - meaning that his (& Lovelace's) ingenious designs were rarely ever built to completion.
Star Citizen?
@@tomholy Omg this is the best description of the development of this game and nobody is seeing it 😭
I fell hard for it, and after like 3 years of not playing they're still putting out new useless ships and ridiculous features that don't add gameplay.
What a beautiful description of CIG now that I see it in context.
@@zualapips1638 Lots of other projects suffer these flaws. In the 1980s someone created a joke computer language named Babbage which had project delays as a major characteristic. This inspired other joke languages such as Brainfuck.
@@johndododoe1411 Befunge
When looking at history, fires have been the kryptonite of technological advancements.
I like to really underline Ada Lovelace's accomplishments. She wrote the first computer program for a computer that was never actually built at a time when the idea of a general purpose computational machine had only just been conceived. From what I've heard, her programs would have worked, too. As a professional programmer I'm profoundly impressed by that achievement.
My dad's a programmer who has four girls, and we grew up in the 1980s with a girl puppy who was quite elegant and beautiful and was named Lacey. When you would ask Dad what that stood for he would say, "Lady Ada Lovelace," and then give us a whoooole lesson! We all ended up in various aspects of STEM.
Up until the 80s that was still kinda how programs where written. After that, magnetic storage took over and things became a lot more like today, just waaaaaaaay slower.
You spent a day carefully writing your program on paper.
Then after making sure there are no errors:
You carefully punch it into cards.
You give the cards to someone who is actually allowed near the card reader. (Hint: This did not apply to a lot of people.)
You wait until your execution window comes. (computing time was obscenely expensive, renting the equivalent of a modern micro controller for 1 day would not be something most people could afford.)
You go and retrieve the output of your program.
Sometimes the result will be that it failed at line 3 because there was a problem with your punch cards.
Keep in mind that punch cards only have a few bytes of storage so even small programs would take a lot of punch cards. Which have to be kept and inserted in the correct order. And depending on how old your reader was: They also wear out because they make physical contact with moving parts.
Because it was all based on Leibniz's theoretical work.
Wrote functional code without once trying to compile it and debug it, meanwhile I spend most of my time chasing missing semi-colons.
Saluton! Kiel vi fartas?
The former CTO of Microsoft, Nathan Myhrvold, funded part of the construction of London's Difference Engine, and in return, they made a second one for his own personal use. I was blessed to be able to see it on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View on Lovelace's 200th birthday.
As I understand it, it's no longer on display, and now resides in the offices of a company he co-founded.
It also does not quite work. They dropped it during shipping.
@@scottfranco1962 Ahh an early example of Linus Sebastion of LTT fame.
@@scottfranco1962 I feel bad for the guy he had the worst luck even after death. A dark cosmic comedy his life was.
Sadly, war tends to create many problems that need solutions. If Babbage had a military application at the time, things may have been different
He may simply have been a few dacades too early.
By the mid 1800s guns didn't yet have the range to make a firecontroll computer necessary.
Such systems started to appear on warships around the 1890s.
War is the mother and father of invention it could be said to be sad I take it for what it is.
Astronomical tables were already used for navigation, so there was actually a military application (naval concerns were important in such developments). It's just that existing tables and such were adequate to the task. I suspect they could have been improved but not by enough to obviously justify the expense etc.
I think a more successful tactic might have been to build the device in modules. A reliable and cheap enough adder would be useful (in accounting, in science and various logistical tasks etc.), likewise a subtractor and multiplier. Build them with an eye towards being able to transfer numbers between (to both allow you to combine operations and to use more digits etc.) and you already have all you need for something like a Difference Engine. Just building something that can punch out numbers onto cards and something else to read the numbers off the cards for basic arithmetic gets you a long way to being able to almost automatically carry out arithmetic sequences. By the 1930s punched card accounting machines were a significant way towards general computer function by this sort of strategy. It might have been doable a lot sooner if someone had been deliberately plotting such a system.
Of course most of Babbage's work occurred before the successful widespread use of mechanical calculators, cash registers etc. in business and the mentality of developing the bits for specific uses and then lashing them together is not a natural one. Rather once the simpler uses had become widespread and elaborated on in certain ways people with an eye towards more ambitious uses started thinking of ways of combining them.
HE DID - that was the big selling point at the time - gunnery tables for calculating the trajectory of shells. thats what the British govt wanted it for. But Babbage just kept missing deadlines, consuming vast amounts of money and getting distracted...
If you had accurate gunnery tables WW1 is 3 months long. You know where the enemy is, you know the weight of the shell, the wind speed etc and BOOM, goodbye enemy
Even in WW2 they were still ranging by trial and error a lot of the time
@@piccalillipit9211 I think you are oversimplyfying long-range gunnery just a bit... ;)
You may know the wind around your ship. But you do not know the wind speed and direction or the exact air density at the apex of the shell's trajectory. Wind may also be different around your target.
And while you know the theoretical muzzle velocity of your gun, the effective muzzle velocity is a bit more fuzzy. Small deviation in the propellant charge, themprature of both the propellant and the barrel, how worn out the barrel is ect. will change the actual muzzle velocity not only for every gun, but for every shot. Some modern artillery pieces have a small radar or inductive sensor that measures the exact shell velocity of every shot for this very reason.
Then there's the ships movement (pitch yaw and roll) and vibration.
Next, while you might THINK you know where exactly your target is, you might be wrong. Especialy in the time before fire controll radar you had to reley on optical systems operated by sailors to establish range, heading and speed of your target. Lots of room for error.
Plus, the enemy is not obliged to keep sailing in a straight line at a perfectly consistent speed.
Battle ranges could be es long as 20 kilometers with battleship guns of the WW1 era.
The british BL 15-inch MK1 gun used on the QEs had a maximum range of over 30 kilometers (though 20-25 kilometers would be a more realistic, practical range) and a muzzle velocity of about 750 m/s.
Assuming the shell flies in a perfectly straight line and does not lose velocity, it will stil take more than 26 seconds for a shell to travel 20 kilometers.
In reality filight time will be considerably longer, obviously.
A lot can happen in that time.
All in all there's a lot of room for randomisation in gunnery. even to this day. And so it is not as simple as BOOM goodbye enemy.
Plus, even if you can hit your enemy and blow him out of the water with your first shot, chances are he can do the same to you...
When Zuse designed his first calculating machine Z1 he knew about Babbage and saw the essential flaw in his machines. They're all base 10. Not only makes this calculation tedious, the storing of numbers get really complicated. So Zuse used Base 2 to design his machine. This made the construction much easier and he could design and build the Z1 in three years in the living room of his parents.
Babbage actually considered using a base 2 design, but decided against it in favor of base 10.
Zuse is my favorite
Konrad Zuse only recognized that because Claude Shannon wrote a paper in 1934 about using Boolean algebra to optimize telephone switch boards. To prove his point he included a diagram for a 4 bit adder. That was the beginning of the digital age.
@@johnhall1852 The paper "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits" was published 1938. Zuse began designing the Z1 in late 1935. He finished the machine in 1938. So his work predates Shannons publication. And even if the paper would have been available earlier Zuse wasn't fluent in English at that time, so he couldn't read it.
I've always been a massive Ada Lovelace fanboy, not only for her brilliance in math and programming, but for her visions of what computers might one day be used for. In that same paper where she laid out the first program, she talks about a world where computers could compose music, or perform and analyze science experiments, etc. She did, however, claim that computers could never be original or intelligent, echoing the objection of many people today that "they only do what we tell them to do" -- an objection that Alan Turing challenged almost a century later by pointing out that we can tell a computer HOW to do something that results in output we can't predict, which would be equivalent to originality or creativity.
I only wish Ada could see what computers, and the AI even she assumed impossible, have become.
It would have been really cool if they could forseen AI. Imagine how they would depict robots in that era, or other machines, what would they look like with such an early lens and none of the technology we have today? How would they expect more complex computers (or I guess engines) to interface with a world beyond punchcards?
Its like with DaVinchis work with ornithopters, early helicopters, and tanks. Without a modern lens to view those concepts with, he arrived to similar, but starkly different solutions. Wood instead of metal, mechanical actuation instead of solid frames and propellers, and 360 motion instead of a 360 rotating cannon ontop of a standard 2 direction vehicle chassis.
I don't count AI as true intelligence, and I also don't think computers are or ever will be capable of original thought. So Ada was still right. Wake me up when the robot uprising finally happens ;-)
@@olavl8827 Thats how you get philosophical. Are modern neural networks approaching human-like thought, or cold and thoughtlessly crunching nonsensical data to approximate thought? At what point do living creatures stop being considered capable of original thought, is it apes, dogs, insects? Is intelligence even capable of being shown on a scale like that? And if it is, what is the difference between a machines thoughts and an organic creatures thoughts?
I may or may not be writing an entire story/series about concepts like this.
@@olavl8827 I guess that depends on how you define "intelligence" and "original thought". I can't think of a definition of either that doesn't apply to current AI already 🤷♂
"The view that machines cannot give rise to surprises is due, I believe, to a fallacy to which philosophers and mathematicians are particularly subject. This is the assumption that as soon as a fact is presented to a mind all consequences of that fact spring into the mind simultaneously with it." - Alan Turing
It was Konrad Zuse who build the first program-controlled computer Z1 (1935-1938) and first programmable computer Z3 (1941). The Harvard Mark 1 came 3 years later!
And I remember reading somewhere that the designers of the influential programming language Algol in the 1960s knew about Zuse’s Plankalkül programming scheme, and took some ideas from it.
The first programmable machine was the Jacquard loom.
it is really weird that every time the topic of first computers comes up, nobody is mentioning konrad zuse. this just makes me sad. show zuse some love jo!
@@LostMekkaSoft Yeah right? Americans always think they were the first ones, but no!
In 2002, the Science Museum in London completed a working version of the Difference Engine No. 2 with its automatic printer. The Calculating portion was completed in 1991, and a second Difference Engine No. 2 had been built by 2008.
Holy crap oh my god. This shows how important funding science is!! Even of it seems fringe and not important, it could be HUGE given proper development. Wow. Great history!
it's kind of funny to think that the world's first Project Manager, along with the world's first Software Engineer, was thwarted by the world's first documented case of Scope Creep ;-)
I bet they might share a drink with some ancient pyramid builders and medieval cathedral architects, telling stories of their own scope creep.
Not just scope creep, but reduced funding.
You are the best at delivering science to the general public. Well done and I'll tip my hat to you a thousand times over.
Way back in the 90's I read an alternate history novel in which Babbage and Lovelace completed the analytical engine, and it was revolutionary. I don't remember much about the book apart from the fact that it was called "The Difference Engine."
The Difference Reality
@@terrafirma9328 No Fay Anne got it right It was writen by Wiliam Gibson and Bruce Sterling .🤖
The birth of Steampunk.
you forgot to mention the first modern computer and the first computer for sale, both of which designed and built by the german zuse.
Who just wanted a easy way out of doing all the standard calculations for his aircraft company by hand.
WHAT IF HISTORY went different. The computer would have continued from the Anti-Kythera Mechanism two thousand years ago. GREAT VIDEO THOUGH!!!
I know the phrase was for brevity, but Ada Lovelace was a "talented mathematician", like Leonard Davinci was good at drawing! We have to remember that Lovelace NEVER had an analytical engine to work with! She essentially read the documentation and hand wrote some stuff for it! And that stuff was invaluable to math and computer science! No debugging! Just PROGRESS!
She was a better programmer than every other programmer ever 😔
Reminds me of the first “chess engine”.. which was a machine that could beat most chess players.. and was actually just a guy hiding in a box below the board.
The mechanical Turk.
In what way?
I love that they were planning to use punch cards. Giant weaving looms used punch cards to store information, it was an existing technology. My 6th grade teacher in the late 80's taught us to code using scantron "punch" cards (we used number 2 pencils).
This is absolutely huge and it went unnoticed for almost a hundred years!! 🤯
Writers, take notes! Steampunk computers can exist in your stories AND no one can't say they're fantasy!
In at least one of his earlier books Robert Heinlein had fusion powered "torch ships" flying around the solar system with whole decks made up of "mechanical integrators" (mechanical computers), to calculate the ships course. Those things would have been much more like Babbage's machines than anything we have now... and I expect one of our phones could do those calculations while playing UA-cams...
Thanks @SciShow for featuring my photo!
It seems really unfortunate that sometimes, scientific ideas and research are largely ignored until a war puts pressure on R&D for some of the more 'unpopular fields'. And, if governments of the time had seen military potential in Babbage's and Lovelace's ideas, would we have seen a computer boom much earlier in human history?
The problem was simply cost. The British government wasn't willing to pay for the manufacturing of the Analytical Engine. Generating the tables by hand were cheaper. As far as accuracy, the pen and paper method was helped with the use of a new invention called "Napier Bones".
The idea of an actual real life steampunk computer era sounds so appealing to me
Lovelace is also Byron's daughter.
It's amazing how when you look to the past you see countless examples of inventions that were so innovative and had so much potential to revolutionize everything and along side those inventions were people that were like "nah that sounds stupid" and kept them from becoming mainstream and essentially kicking off the modern era much much earlier. In my experience Ive learned that, for the most part,, people are so narrow minded that they refuse to see greatness when it sits directly in front of them. All because it doesn't vibe with how they think things should be. If you're reading this then this message is for you.
Do NOT limit your way of thinking based only on your own perspectives. Always do your best to see things from other points of view and don't be afraid to admit you don't have all the answers.. Ask others for their opinions and ask them to expand on why they think the way they do. Take in as many people's opinions as you can and encourage outside the box thinking and wild ideas whenever possible...or you could be one of the fools who stops worldwide innovation and history altering ideas from ever becoming a reality. Maybe you will be one of the morons that literally stops civilization from moving forward by leaps and bounds just because you think if it doesn't jive with your opinions it must be stupid.
Don't let history remember you for being that guy/girl
im not buying an nft
*Seeing the title* They're talking about Ada Lovelace!
I'm an English major; I adore the critical analysis of Literature and studying the effects of media. So of course I adore Lord Byron. My brother is a mathematician. He has always said he would love to name his daughter Ada after Ada Lovelace. The fact that these two personalities are related has always brought us a nerdy sort of joy. Math and lit are often seen as studies directly opposed to one another; I even viewed them this way for a long time. However, people who are intelligent and passionate about subjects can prove that wrong. It's a cultural assumption that just because one product of math is hard answers/fact, and Literature is entirely devoted to subjectivity that they are opposite. In fact, the same intelligence that allows for high mathematical comprehension allows us the critical thinking skills necessary in the study of literature.
literature asks the sort of questions that science can't, or can't ask effeciently.
I wonder if people had started advancing their computers right away, imagine if we had invented eletronic computers a century earlier.
Skynet would be built a century earlier 🤔
The internet could have been invented in the early 1900s and this would have been around the 100th year of the internet.
@@pauldeddens5349 networking would have come not long after the telegraph, so yeah somewhere between the last third of the Nineteenth century and the start of the Twentieth.
That is impossible to know. It could have even had the opposite effect and lead to decisions that could have caused for Personal computers and the Internet to Not exist.
@@maythesciencebewithyou Just like with the combustion engine cars and electric motor cars.
I have a feeling this is going to be used in a lot of Steam Punk fiction, if it isn’t already.
@@capturedflame the genre already existed by 1987 when the term was coined by K. W. Jeter to describe work by himself, Tim Powers, and James Blaylock.
It was one of the major influences of the creation of the genre.
I've never been able to understand how computers go from "solve these math problems" to "display this UA-cam video"
Displaying a youtube video is a math problem, as is every problem.
First you design a reversible representation system, then you “encode” raw data into your system, then you use a system someone else created to transmit your digital representation, and since the receiver has your system as well, and it’s reversible, they just reverse the representation back into data that can act on certain elements.
Eg a system to represent colour might want every pixel to be given an identifier, a red value, a green value and a blue value. So, the camera gives the system the RGB value for every pixel position on the camera sensor, and then the system converts that into a png for example. Or it might take a new RGB value between 24 and 120 times per second, and the system converts that to an mp4.
One easy way to do this is to give certain geometric shapes a unique identifier, such as circles, curves, lines etc, then just break down images into those shapes and use their identifiers with their locations, size, distortions and rotations to “describe” the image, or don’t bother to reencode groups of pixels that stay the same throughout multiple consecutive frames, and have transitions and object movement have the identifiers that you give parameters too.
Once that’s done, you package up your new representation, make it very clear what is inside, then put it through systems that can duplicate the code and check that it’s the same as the original. Then, when you take your representation and run it through the system in reverse, you should recreate most of the important information. The more complex your system is, the more details you can recreate, but also the more data you need to move. Also if you know how a system works, you can break it pretty easily. There’s a yt video that has a lot of confetti and no matter the resolution you watch at, you lose all quality. Also mkbhd has a video where he uploaded a video many times through UA-cams compression system and the effect of running the compression output back through the compression algorithm over and over ruins the video quite significantly.
@@jonathanodude6660 Whoo
@@jonathanodude6660 the confetti thing isn't specific to a given compression algorithm, of course. Noise is pure information with no redundancy to remove.
Applause is an example of audio noise which is also hard to compress.
@@michaelmicek yeah true. I was just giving an example that’s easy to find. Idk how all compression algorithms work but confetti would be hard work for all of them.
Imagine the outcome if research on this technology did happen and improved and worked as intended and got better maybe outcome could have been different
We might be living like the Jetsons now
Imagine if we had 40 more years of Advanced Computers computers that are playing time would be even more advanced than they are today
Imagine if the antikythera device had taken off.
Imagine if Rome discovered electricity and their steam engine took off.
"Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer programs" is a fact that I've known for awhile but never understood until this video! I knew the programs were written out but not that there was an actual computer she meant for them to run on.
This is incredible. In one of my stories, I had a "naturally occurring" mechanical creature, who looks like it had to have been built. and is always using technology a few decades before its time. In the 1800s with advanced gas lamps that look like spotlights, an early steam engine to power it, and of course a mechanical brain. Its incredible to think that it _actually_ might have been able to exist with that sort of technology in that era (minus the AI, but still theoretically possible)
Lame 😒
Me using my computer, goes on youtube...
"The World's First True Computer Still Hasn't Been Built"
guess ill use my not-computer to see what this is about
Amazing article. Going to show my students this up coming year.
One crucial feature of the Difference Engine that gets ignored is its printout method. As mentioned, mathematical data tables contained errors because they were done by hand. But even if they were correct the typesetters could make mistakes, and such tables were difficult to proofread. Babbage's solution was to have the Engine "print" the results onto plaster. The plaster mold was then used to cast the print block for the page in one piece.
Babbage was not a "young British scientist". He was the Lucasian chair of Mathematics in Cambridge. It is one of the most distinguished academic posts worldwide. Previous chairs included Newton Dirac Hawking and Michael Green.
I'd love to see a series on "forgotten" technology or Scientific What Ifs
I really would love to have a robust analytical engine, because like, Most humans don't need to do 10 thousand calculations a second. I think having a machine that can crunch two or three complex equations with a crank would be ideal for small community, especially a post-cyber community.
You are seriously underestimating the size and scale of the Analytical Engine. The most complete design we have would have been 5 tonnes of iron and brass, all of which would need to be cut and finished with painstaking precision, because the friction and vibration from the many thousands of gears would grind any ill-fitted parts to powder.
@@watchm4ker no, I know how large the analytic engine is, but I also know that a new version with modern computational science behind it has not been designed in at least the last twenty years. Considering the advancements in material science and engineering over the last 40 years, it would not be unimaginable for it to be reduced in size while increasing functionality.
I think they call those calculators. Thats effectively what the analytical engine was, just an enormous calculator thats inputs were in punchcards instead of buttons.
A purely solar powered calculator would do the job far more effectively. Or we could just start remanufacturing the Curta.
You might want to take a look at the Curta Calculator. Whilst it is ony a caculator, not a rogrammeable comuter, it is entirely mechancical, and an astonishing achievement - the more so when you learn the conditions under which it was designed!
Great video! Thank you for including Ada Lovelace.
Man this just makes me wanna read Neal Stephenson's The System of the World again.
4:33 no that is incorrect.
The first programmable computer that was actually built, was the Zuse Z3, see: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_Engine#Comparison_to_other_early_computers
It not even was early than the MARK I, it was vastly superior.
Only three calculations per second? Well, to be fair, that's faster than I can enter computations into my calculator.
0:14 You omitting Konrad Zuse, his "Z3" was a programmable Computer already in 1941. Two years before the "Harvard Mark 1".
I'd love to see a SciShow episode about the Antikythera mechanism. Basically an ancient Greek analog computer that was hand powered. It was used for astronomical predictions and the story of its discovery and how its purpose and function were determined is fascinating!
Babbage recognised that there were not only errors from human calculations, but also errors in transcribing tables of calculated numbers to the printed page.
He designed the difference engine to stamp its results onto sheets of metal that could be used to print pages of numbers, without errors.
So, do we have mini novelty replica toy versions of these in science museum gift shops yet?
I want one...
The first punch card programmable machines were Jacquard Silk Looms built in the late 1700s
The card format was on the looms, the holes in a paper tape was around before this and used at places like Schloss Hellbrunn where the holes are the slots for activation pegs for the waterpark entertainment.
but only the data input was configurable (the pattern) but not the operation as it was a fixed function machine. The analytical engine was general purpose - what today we would label programmable but the difference engine (and looms) were not.
The "Difference Engine." I love it.
Great video, but I did I miss the part where you talked about the title? You refer to general purpose computers several times in this video but the title claims the first "true" one hasn't been built yet? Or is the title setting the stage for the story, ie "it's 1830 and the first computer hasn't been built"?
It's saying that the first design for a general-purpose computer hasn't been made, even if other, much newer ones, have.
@@mayhair ohhh I understand. No one has made Babbage's original design into a reality yet, NOT no one has made a general purpose computer yet. Thanks!
@@shashwemmie to clarify further - the Difference Engine (which _has_ been recently built by the British Museum as shown in the video) was a fixed function calculator for churning out tables including a printer! But even that was abandoned by Babbage for dreams of a general purpose machine - the Analytical Engine - which was never built either then or now.
A small part of the Difference Engine was built as a prototype that guests could hand-crank to add a few digits with carry (iirc) as a party piece at one of Babbage's London soires for the great and good.
It was really cool they had the reference to Ada Lovelace in x deaths of wolverine for Mora...was stoked to hear about her again here.
Love Hank’s positivity as always oh and also that bomb a$$ jacket too
Reminds me of how Heron of Alexandria was just ever so slightly short of inventing the stream engine around the 1st century.
If you want to know hat a mechanical computer can do just look in to the old Naval fire control computers. They are not as general purpose but can make high level calculation on the fly, with gears rollers and disks.
Fun fact: Ada Lovelace was the daughter of poet Lord Byron.
This has to be done. A clanking steam powered computer just needs to exist.
0:17 The first Bombe was Polish, and created before the war began. Also, Konrad Zuse developed a programmable computer in Germany...
"revolutionary machines that could calculate artillery range"
So they basically could run DOOM? 🤔
1940s: *first computers*
Antikythera mechanism: *Am I a joke to you?*
Imagine if we had ray tracing games in the 1920s if their computers pushed through
and imagine what we would have now
@@ariel-ew2fh we'd have already colonized mars and have transplanetary communication. Maybe even quantum computing.
My guy and gal literally 100 years ahead of their time.
Respect for the lost geniuses.
For those curious about with a computerized Victorian era might have looked like, I reccomend Bruce Sterling & William Gibson's "the Difference Engine", one of the seminal works of steampunk fiction with heavy cyberpunk overtones.
Shopify just fired 10% of its workforce. To hell with them.
now imagine, 50 years later the telegraph network was already in use, in a sense, we could have had a proto-internet a century before our own
Now Babbage lives on a steampunk-mecha helping fix singularities and Lostbelts
One problem, the first Bombe wasn't built by Brits, it was built by Poles, before the war started and shipped to UK together with all the cryptanalysis materials for the 3 rotor Enigma.
Right Hank! Literally paused this video cause your swag is next level. Look at that banging jacket.
Barclays Bank in the Uk has a large technology campus in which 2 of the buildings are named after Lovelace and Babbage, the other two buildings are named after Turing and Kilburn
Somebody needs to get on this.
I believe scientists are looking at a modern difference engine for parts of a venus surface probe since a mechanical computer can be made to withstand the high temperature and peressure found on Venus'
surface.
One of computing's biggest "what ifs". If Babbage had finished the Difference Engine then went on to make the Analytical Engine, computing would've gotten over a century's head-start. Couple that with the telegraph, which itself spurred tremendous change, and there might have been a Victorian information age.
The Science Museum built the full Difference Engine based on the original small section of it and Babbage's notes and designs, and even as the "base model", it can crunch some pretty hellacious math. A few twists of the crank handle and it prints the results on a paper tape.
Nice scishow👏👏👏...can you please make a compilation videos about computers too
Well, considering how human history is, technology has been discovered, lost, rediscovered, even lost a second, third, or fourth time and finally rediscovered or still lost... all due to war, disaster, disinterest, ect. Humanity could be many hundreds of years even thousands of years more technologically advanced or even still stuck in the stoneage depending on what factors played into history. Even today, humanity could suffer a catastrophic event that could set it back or further advance it depending on how humanity reacts to the event. Example... say we get into another world war... with the knowledge we posses we could destroy ourselves a thousand times over... but if humanity reacts in just the right way... that destruction could also catapult us to the stars and beyond. It's all in how humanity reacts to the events. Where it not for research of some of our wars we would not have discovered penicillin... which has saved many thousands of people. And the desire for faster warbirds lead to faster civilian air craft as well. Humanity is violent and destructive... but it is also amazingly creative and innovative. Sometimes it engages in acts of supreme stupidity and sometimes in acts of amazing intelligence.
Ooo! Just thought of how one of our earliest reactions to external forces could have influenced hominins this is all speculation of course... I saw some where that the primates that lead to hominins had to come down out of the trees... if they had stayed in the trees and made no effort to adapt to sparce tree conditions we probably would not have discovered fire, marrow as a food source, or even walking upright... they would probably have gone extinct or have to wait for the forests to grow back to thrive... then nothing would happen... The one reaction to fewer trees may have lead to massive changes in pre human primates that allowed for soo many changes. And the adaptability of humans.
So fascinating, what would our tech look like now if this had gotten the attention it deserved?
The world war 2 computers were the first useable computers, but the first electronic computer, designed much as modern computers are, including capacitive memory (driven by transistors) was designed in 1934 by a physicist who was assisted by one of the designers of E.N.I.A.C.
I’d love to visit the alternate timeline where my Grampa recounts his childhood stories of using his RTX 3080 to 1v1 scrubs in Minecraft PVP
This reminds me of the use of high intelligence in evolution and survival. At first it is just a hindrance, and pretty useless, but when it reaches a certain level, it makes all the difference, by far, from anything else.
extremely entertaining and interesting video. i hope this channel goes on forever!
“An old aquaintance”
“It would be funny if it was ada”
“Named ada lovelace”
The oldest example of an analogue computer is the ancient greek Antikythera mechanism which was discovered in 1901.
It was used to predict astronomical positions and eclipses decades in advance.
The analytical engine truly is the first computer ever invented.
There is a light novel [clockwork planet] where everything works by gears, from the most everyday thing to the gravity of the planet and the atmosphere, is the story of a boy who can hear even the smallest of clock ticks at an molecular level.
Ancient civilizations had already developed eletric batteries and flying gliders, Leonardo da Vinci made several projects which would only become fullfledged inventions hundreds of years later. It is no surprise that such precursors came up with amazing things which failed to catch on because the social need for their projects wasn't realized yet.
Its nice that some videogames which are set during industrial age, they put difference engine in to game or story.
It was in game Frostpunk and Amnesia A Machine for pigs.
(I think there are more games which also mentions difference engine)
I think Babbage's difference engine was the most "ahead of its time" idea that anyone has ever had.
I think it's a dead heat between the Analytical Engine and the Antijythera mechanism.
@@esmenhamaire6398 True indeed. I forgot about that one. It's a shame that we don't know anything about its creator.
I keep hearing history videos of someone almost invented some awesome technology and then they didn't. The steam engine is the other store you hear about all the time.
The history of science continues to be messy if Anglophones ignore the work done by those outside their culture or language: why don't these sorts of videos ever mention or show what Konrad Zuse did for computing?
Not to mention that the first Bombe was designed an built by Poles, and then shipped to UK just before start of the war.
@@666Tomato666 And then a guy named Tommy figured out how to do it electronically, but was sworn to excessive secrecy so he couldn't tell his post war government job that electronic telephone exchanges would be easy using his wartime experience. One of his successors secretly invented modern public key technology, but it was classified by the same department that classified the WW2 stuff.
Coolness- Cbarles Babbage, thank you and Lady Ada.
God bless.
The game Lovelace & Babbage is great, and is basically analytical engine, where YOU, the player, are the engine. It's very fun!
We Brits have long been cursed with short sighted politicians.
Very very cool!
Idk why, but I just love computer history
It makes me wonder what Babbage would think of todays computers. I wonder if he would recognize what his initial invention became? 🧐🤯
I think the real beauty of the internet is that the odds of something that important being shoved to the side for 100 years is now incredibly unlikely. It's too easy to spread ideas far and wide to see truly innovative ideas just die.
You mean like solar cells?
"On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." - Charles Babbage
The confusion of humans (with their intents and purposes), and the machine (with its' mechanism.)
PS. Thanks for sharing this gem of a quote!
Dude...a steam driven computer? I know what my next d&d character will be.
There is a great book on the what if part...but it hasn't been translated to english called NSA Nationales Sicherheitsamt by Eschbach.Give it a try when you can read/ understand German
Someone has to build it as proof of concept.