By TED THORNHILL...... Charles Babbage laid down blueprints for the programmable computer in the 1830s – now experts want the help of the public to build it to see if it would have worked.
Programmer John Graham-Cumming and former London Science Museum curator Doron Swade, will post plans for the Babbage Analytical Engine online next year in a ‘crowd-sourcing’ project called Plan 28, that they say could take 10 years to see through.
It was Alan Turing and Tommy Flowers who brought Babbage’s concepts to fruition in the 1930s, but experts have long argued over whether Babbage should really be considered the true inventor of complex computers.
Basic: The Analytical Engine was designed to use punch cards as a means of performing calculations
Analytical Engine: What it lacked in processing power, it made up for in size and brass plating
Graham-Cumming said: ‘I hope that future generations of scientists will stand before the completed Analytical Engine, think of Babbage and be inspired to work on their own 100-year leaps.’
A much simpler Babbage machine – The Difference Engine No 2 – was built in 1991.
That machine consisted of 8,000 mechanical components – The Analytical Engine is far more complex, not least because, unlike for the Difference Engine, there is no overall finished plan for it.
'Father of computing': Charles Babbage
It’s the size of a room and occupied Babbage, who was born in London in 1791, until he passed away aged 79 in 1871.
It was intended to work using a series of punched cards, gears and wheels and in theory would be able to carry out fairly complex calculations.
The Engine was beyond the comprehension of most people at the time.
However, a program was waiting in the wings for it courtesy of Ada Lovelace, a hugely talented mathematician who realised that Babbage was on to something.
Graham-Cumming believes that before the machine can be built it will need to be simulated by computer.
Turing and Flowers, in the 1930s and 1940s, were essentially rediscovering Babbage's ideas, who knew 100 years before that he had conceived something revolutionary.
At the time he wrote: 'As soon as an Analytical Engine exists, it will necessarily guide the future course of science.'
Complicated: The Engine was beyond the comprehension of most people at the time
The Science Museum is currently working on digitising its entire archive of Babbage’s original notes, plans and drawings – with the aim of widening public access to the collection and promoting greater engagement in the history of science.
The completion of the project is expected to be formally announced by summer 2012.
At the moment access to the Archive is only possible via a physical visit to the reading room of the Science Museum Library and Archives at Wroughton, near Swindon.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2059968/Did-Charles-Babbage-invent-programmable-1830.html
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