Date: Apr 17 2000 06:29:13 EDT
From: "Ian Miles" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Difference Engine: a different take
Doron Swade has just published a book on Babbage's Difference Engine.
It is hailed in the Observer as "Longitude Mark 2". Hmm.
Coincidentally, as the first step in a webbification of all
sorts of unpublished pieces of my own from the late 80s/early 90s
(they had been languishing on an Atari ST in my kids' bedroom), I
have just put up on:
http://les.man.ac.uk/cric/Ian_Miles/Papers/BABBAGE.html
a paper entitled: "Machinery Has Been Taught Poetry Instead of
Arithmetic: Babbage and the Division of Mental and Manual Labour"
This discusses Michael Lindgren's book (1987) "Glory and Failure",
a really nice study that describes how the Difference Engine actually
was built in the 1840s (in an early example of teenage garage
computing!) in Sweden, and did NOT have to wait for the Science
Musuem to undertake its project in the 1990s. (This study is
undeservedly obscure, and I plan to use my web pages to bring to
light a number of obscure but fascinating works like this.)
The paper also discusses the well-worn question of the primacy of
cosciousness and action, given interest in the relation between
Babbage's computing and his political economy...
... and reaches no easy answers.
and there are the beginnings of an argument with the Gibson/Sterling
alternative history of the DE.
All the best
Ian
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[log in to unmask] Director, PREST, CRIC, both University of
Manchester Tel (+44) 161 275 5922; fax (+44) 161 273 1123;
PREST's page: http://les.man.ac.uk/PREST/
POLICY RESEARCH IN ENGINEERING, SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
CRIC: Centre for Research in Innovation and Competition
MY PAGES AT CRIC, NEWLY UPDATED APRIL 2000:
http://les.man.ac.uk/cric/Ian_Miles/
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