Vintage Computer Festival 9.0

[foxgrrl]

I showed up kinda late on Sunday, so everyone was packing up to leave by the time I started taking pictures. I think these photos were taken over about 90 minutes. I need to go to bed now, so I can't tell the story of all this yet. I'll come back and edit this later…

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Comments

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

I think you have that backwards. The Difference engine was smaller than the Analytical engine by a good deal. The analytical engine was only ever described by Babbage, but he never managed to get it built. The difference engine was a simpler arithmetic solver, a calculator. The Analytical engine was a proper computer in the modern sense, and had he managed to get the support to build it the world would have had it's first general purpose computer 100 years before WWII cryptologist hot for automation would look back to Turing's paper "Computable numbers" and realize that they were wasting a lot of time with columns of figures when they could be counting with electrons instead of their fingers.

[cobaltie.livejournal.com]

Ahh, yeah. I didn't look it up ahead of time, was just going on memory. I was getting confused with Neal Stephenson and Bruce Sterling's novel 'The Difference Engine', which describes a steampunk Victorian England with exactly that premise: Babbage completes his Analytical Engine and computers made of oiled brass gears are all over.