Quotes About Babbage

Peel finally decided to interrupt the endless stream of complaints and grievances and call Babbage to order with a hard fact: 'Mr Babbage, by your own admission you have rendered the Difference Engine useless by inventing a better machine.' Babbage took the bait and glared at Peel. 'But if I finish the Difference Engine it will do even more than I promised. It is true that it has been superseded by better machinery, but it is very far from being "useless.

It is quite possible that British Intelligence demanded that Babbage keep his work secret, thus providing them with a nine-year head start over the rest of the world.

Turing knew of Babbage's work, and the universal Turing machine can be seen as a reincarnation of Difference Engine No. 2. In fact, Turing had gone much further, and provided computing with a solid theoretical basis

Babbage's Three Laws of Difference Engines First Law: A difference engine must have at least six cogs. Second Law: A difference engine must be able to operate a loom. Third law: A difference engine must be able to kill a man, should the mood so take it.

Babbage had most of this system sketched out by 1837, but the first true computer to use this programmable architecture didn't appear for more than a hundred years.

All large organizations are either superorganisms whose cells are human bodies, or very slow artificial intelligences that use human beings as gears in the Babbage engines that run their code.

The Difference Engine stands—for a replica works today, in the Science Museum in London—as a milestone of what could be achieved in precision engineering. In the composition of its alloys, the exactness of its dimensions, the interchangeability of its parts, nothing surpassed this segment of an unfinished machine. Still, it was a curio. And it was as far as Babbage could go.

Babbage was a brilliant mathematician but found human beings difficult to deal with. His intolerance of street musicians led to an organized campaign against him: his London home in Portland Place was bombarded by noise at all hours and abusive signs were hung in local shops.