| The Difference Engine | Contributor: Amfo | Posted: 20/02/07 | 15:34 |
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page 1 of 4  The Difference Engine
Authors: William Gibson & Bruce Sterling Publisher: Bantam (Random House) First Published: 1991 This Edition: 1992 Pages: 429 (this edition) ISBN-13: 978 0 55329 461 3 Class: Science Fiction Niche: Steampunk Every single information technology undergraduate does a class at some point in his or her first year called something like "Introduction to Computing" or "The History of Computing". And during that class, the undergraduate duly learns that starting in 1822, an Englishman named Charles Babbage designed and partly built a series of mechanical computers. One of the earlier devices he called "The Difference Engine", and while a reconstruction in 1991 showed that it worked well, Babbage was unable to complete it because he ran out of cash and apparently fought too much with the people who were best positioned to give him more. Babbage then went on to design a much more sophisticated device called the "Analytical Engine" which had a whole bunch of features that were eerily similar to a modern computer - separate program and data memory, instruction-based operation, programmability, even a printer - but once again he was unable to secure the funds to build it. A woman named Ada Lovelace (daughter of Lord Byron), a gifted mathematician, even wrote a short program for the Analytical Engine, which would have calculated the Bernoulli Numbers. As a result, Ada is considered (a bit patronisingly) as the world's first computer programmer and even has a heavily mathematical programming language named after her. And that was pretty much that for Charles Babbage and the Difference Engine, at least as far as the real world is concerned. But 160 years later, established cyberpunk authors William Gibson and Bruce Sterling knocked heads and considered the question all reasonably bright IT undergraduates consider when they first learn about the Difference Engine: how different would the world be if the thing had actually been built and commercialised? |
