Put aside your ultra-thin MacBook Air for just a minute. It's time to get your Steampunk on, and gain some historical perspective on how we've come to have such powerful computers wrapped in such small packages.
Some Brits are out to build a prototype computer from designs first put forward back in the late 1830s by mathematician and engineer Charles Babbage. The Analytical Engine, as he dubbed it, was to be a mechanical, reprogrammable data cruncher made from brass and iron. It was to be the 2.0 version of Babbage's Difference Engine, a smaller (yet still substantial) machine that actually did get built.
Think of the Difference Engine as more of a calculator, though.
John Graham-Cumming, the man behind the push to realize Babbage's dreams, told the BBC that the designs suggest that Analytical Engine would've been "the size of a small lorry (truck), and powered by steam." Graham-Cumming also notes: "It had expandable memory, a CPU...a printer...and was programmable with punch cards."
At least on paper. As you can see above, only bits of the giant machine were ever built. There's even an incomplete miniature version done in Meccano.
Graham-Cumming's set up a website called Plan 28. It's devoted to raising awareness of, and funds for, the project. Before any actual construction can start, though, Graham-Cumming says there is much research to be done. From the Plan 28 website: "Babbage left multiple plans for the Analytical Engine and was constantly refining its design up until his death. To build the Analytical Engine first requires a research project to figure out which plan to build from."
The plan is to create a 3D virtual model of the machine, try to work out all the bugs, and then actually build it.
It took some other folks 17 years to build a replica of the Difference Engine, by the way. Completing the Analytical Engine would be another order of magnitude entirely.
Other fun facts -- the Analytical Engine would probably have about 1K of memory, and be about 13 times slower than some of the first personal computers.
Photo: Bruno Barral
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