The Babbage Engine
The Babbage Engine
The worlds heaviest calculator
For fans of mechanical calculators, this is a must-see. The Computer History Museum in Mountain View currently has a working copy of Charles Babbage’s difference engine on display. This is a calculator designed in the 1850s but never build until this century. The machine weighs over 8 tons and has thousands of moving parts. It can be set up to generate logarithms or other mathematical functions and it even has a printer. Pretty sophisticated for a mathematician who lived in the age of steam.
Sunday, September 7, 2008