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Post a Comment On: Steve Sailer: iSteve

"Babbage Remembered"

27 Comments -

1 – 27 of 27
Anonymous Dave Gelernter LLC said...

Please. Babbage's was way inferior to Egghead or even CompUSA

11/7/11, 8:16 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine isn't very good as a novel but is a lot of fun as a speculative history of a mid 19th Century England where the Babbage-Lovelace steam-driven computer revolution took place and the country's modernization happened even faster than it did in the real world.

11/7/11, 8:16 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Every one of Paul Johnson's books has an obscene number of errors. He is easily the most enjoyable read among contemporary historians. But I bet he's a real a-hole in person. I assume that given his extreme interest in the sex lives of historical figures he doesn't like.

11/7/11, 8:36 PM

Anonymous jody said...

there was a guy in nazi germany, konrad zuse, who built the world's first real computer, totally on his own, around 1940. but nobody knew about it, because it was done completely in secret. after the war, IBM bought lots of his stuff. he definitely is not remembered by anybody, in the US at least - he received no coverage of any kind.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse

babbage is certainly remembered by people into computer science or even science. not an major historical figure, sure, though he is mentioned briefly in mainstream history classes. he was mentioned, i should say. in 2011 i have no idea who actually appears in history books. according to steve and other posters, the diversicrats have...altered things.

there is a programming language called ada, named after lovelace, so she's at least remembered by that. in fact that was the first thing i thought about when i saw the name augusta ada king.

11/7/11, 11:56 PM

Anonymous FelixM said...

"Dickens modelled a character on (Babbage)."

Who was it, and what's the book?

11/8/11, 12:31 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"babbage is certainly remembered by people into computer science or even science."

You missed the point of this post. Babbage is remembered...now. He had been forgotten for a while, until the computer was invented. He's been well known among the general literate population for decades.

11/8/11, 1:18 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"babbage is certainly remembered by people into computer science or even science. not an major historical figure, sure, though he is mentioned briefly in mainstream history classes."

Oh bollocks. Babbage is a major historical figure. Any comprehensive study of that period -and not just CS books- would have mentioned him.

You are just historically ignorant.

11/8/11, 1:33 AM

Anonymous josh said...

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Babbage&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3

11/8/11, 2:31 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Try "The Cogwheel Brain"by,I think,Doron Swaine.
An entertaining biography of Babbage but concentrating on his efforts to build the difference engine.

11/8/11, 3:23 AM

Anonymous David said...

Ada Lovelace has been absurdly hyped by feminist historians. In reality she struggled with basic math. For a judicious de-bunking see Dorothy Stein's biography of her.

11/8/11, 3:56 AM

Anonymous Georgia Resident said...

I dunno. I remember that in the one computer science class I took, Babbage figured prominently enough in the intro lecture that I actually remember who he is from that class alone. The professor seemed to think that the history of computer science basically began with Babbage (and I myself have no basis to dispute his impression). So I think quite a few people, and most comp sci people, are at least aware of Babbage.

11/8/11, 4:15 AM

Blogger Graham Asher said...

"Besides the obvious mechanical and metallurgical problems, Babbage didn't have good corporate structure examples to draw upon."

Babbage solved the engineering problems brilliantly. Unfortunately he was a poor manager. He fell out with his contractors, and handled the relationship with government badly, continually delaying the deivery of anything useful. He had no concept of 'ship early and ship often'.

11/8/11, 4:33 AM

Anonymous Carol Bartz! said...

A 19th century English noblewoman writing computer algorithms is like a dog walking on its hind legs. It's not done up to modern standards of anonymous blog commenters but you're surprised to find it done at all.

11/8/11, 4:35 AM

Anonymous headache said...

jody,
thks for remembering zuse. in germany he is cult among nerds. of course his big handicap was that he was german and worked under the nazis, so that makes him per definition evil and justifies others pilfering his ideas. its the same with the US, French, UK and USSR rocket programs. the handwriting of nazi rocket scientists all over it.

11/8/11, 6:11 AM

Anonymous Jacob Roberson said...

Reminds me of Khan's post a couple days ago. Further to his question: If someone is behaviorally modern enough to make something, are we behaviorally modern enough to keep it?

11/8/11, 7:01 AM

Anonymous candid observer said...

From Markoff's article:

"The Lovelace notes are remarkable both for her algorithm for calculating the sequence known as Bernoulli numbers..." (bolding mine).

But here's what Babbage wrote:

"I then suggested that she add some notes to Menabrea's memoir, an idea which was immediately adopted. We discussed together the various illustrations that might be introduced: I suggested several but the selection was entirely her own. So also was the algebraic working out of the different problems, except, indeed, that relating to the numbers of Bernoulli, which I had offered to do to save Lady Lovelace the trouble. This she sent back to me for an amendment, having detected a grave mistake which I had made in the process."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace

I hardly know what to say, other than "sigh".

11/8/11, 7:46 AM

Anonymous Kylie said...

"'Dickens modelled a character on (Babbage).'

Who was it, and what's the book?"


I think it was Daniel Doyce from Little Dorrit.

11/8/11, 8:26 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"It's not done up to modern standards of anonymous blog commenters but you're surprised to find it done at all."

Ada Lovelace day! and a movie that might star a good looking actress to play the part

11/8/11, 9:56 AM

Anonymous jody said...

"You are just historically ignorant."

i'm certainly ignorant of a great many things, but charles babbage is not a major historical figure.

students are more likely to be taught about eli whitney and the cotton gin for instance than they are about babbage, and eli whitney is definitely not a major historical figure in any way shape or form. no professional historians really consider whitney some kind of key figure in the history of mankind and they don't do best selling biographies of him or 1 hour television specials about his life. we got any movies made about eli whitney? we got a movie coming out about j edgar hoover, who had much less effect on the world than eli whitney. heck, we got a movie about michael oher, a completely average football tackle. but no eli whitney adaptation yet.

to the average historian's opinion, he's just another inventor, and he rates the same standard 1 paragraph of text in a mainstream history book, that any other notable inventor usually rates.

11/8/11, 11:45 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

charles babbage is not a major historical figure


The concept of the "major historical figure" is meaningless. Somebody can be a MHF in America, but be totally unknown in Japan or Germany. Somebody can be a MHF in the field of botany, while being a nobody in the field of mechanical engineering. A person can be a MHF in one century, and a footnote in history three hundred years later.

11/8/11, 1:07 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"i'm certainly ignorant of a great many things, but charles babbage is not a major historical figure."

You're so ignorant you missed the entire point of the article AND Steve's post on the article, which is that BABBAGE IS FAMOUS! He was famous in his time, then sunk into obscurity, then got revived when people noticed that, hey, this computer thing we've been inventing? This guy already did!

That was LONG ago.

Gödel, Escher, Bach has something like 30 pages on Babbage, and discusses the Lovelace objection to AI to boot. GEB was a Pulitzer prize winner in 1980, for crap's sake!

Further, the Lovelace objection was key to the Lucas argument against AI.

Basic, basic stuff, dude.

11/8/11, 2:09 PM

Anonymous jody fan said...

I really enjoyed that cranky comment for some reason. In high skool they taught me Eli Whitney caused the U.S. Civil War but yeah, in the long view, he was basically another dime-a-dozen inventor, i.e. loser. Babbage is popular with some such Cory Doctorow types, i.e. the loser's losers. In "Moneyball" Jeremy Van Brown was a huge star w/ .364 OBP

Also must factor Worthington's Law

11/8/11, 2:55 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

" Babbage is popular with some such Cory Doctorow types, i.e. the loser's losers."

Someone maaaaaaaaaaaad.

11/8/11, 4:16 PM

Anonymous ender wiggin said...

I believe Doctorow is the one who talks about being able to laser-print lunch some day real soon now? Whoever pulls that off will be a MHF

Then we plug the Orthodox breeders into some VR matrix game.

11/8/11, 4:19 PM

Anonymous David Worthington said...

The comment wasn't really a knock against this Canadian fellow, on whom I've no opinion for/against. He writes novels. He's certainly richer than I.

I was attempting to "riff" on who gets considered major historical. "In the fast-moving society Cory Doctorow will be world famous to 15 people" and so forth. No value judgment, just pointing out the inherent comedy of geeks pitting their idols against other geeks'

11/8/11, 5:02 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Interesting woman

11/8/11, 9:10 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

How did I miss this nuttiness?

11/8/11, 9:17 PM

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