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Friday, March 18, 2011

A £400,000 PC downgrade: Rebooting Babbage’s Analytical Engine (Wired UK)

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From Wired UK:

"John Graham-Cumming is rebooting Babbage's Analytical Engine -- with its 1.7kB of memory.

Name: John Graham-Cumming
Occupation: Programmer and 3D modeller
Location: London
Why he's important: He's building a missing part in the history of the PC

With more than 40,000 moving parts and at nearly five metres long, Charles Babbage's steam-powered Analytical Engine is regarded as one of the earliest examples of a programmable computer. Yet remarkably, since the British mathematician first described it in 1837, the machine has never been fully built -- the only existing part is its printing mechanism, pictured above..."

read the full post on WiredUK

Posted via email from Siobhan O'Flynn's 1001 Tales

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