Babbage's Analytical Engine.
Daniel Goodman
In article <moo-040896...@sl14.midtown.net>,
Bryan Cowan <m...@midtown.net> wrote:
>In article <4u2kdf$m...@ccshst05.uoguelph.ca>, bga...@uoguelph.ca (Barry
>Gaudet) wrote:
>
>> What if Babbage had actually built a functioning Analytical Engine?
>>
>> Would it have accelerated computer, and possibly, electrical/electronic
>> development?
>>
>> Would it have led to a false path of steam driven 'engines'?
>
>I believe that a few years ago cyberpunk writers William Gibson
>(_Neuromancer_) and Bruce Sterling teamed up to write an AH novel based on
>this very what if. The book is called _The Difference Engine_, and most
>big bookstores should have a paperback copy.
Which does not answer the question. A work of fiction is not a work of
historical scholarship. Personally, I decided from reviews of _The
Difference Engine_ that it was so distant from anything probable as not to
be worth my reading. But maybe the authors _did_ manage to justify their
premises.
--
Dan Goodman
MPLS, MN, USA
"The only peace is that interior in us."
Nick Eden
dsg...@visi.com (Daniel Goodman) wrote:
The book's ghastly. Don't bother looking for it. Hell, if you really
want to send me the postage and I'll mail you my copy (since I'm in
the UK and you're not it's probably not that worthwhile a suggestion.)
Had Babbage built the engine how would things be different?...
I just don't know how it would have influenced science. Most science
of the period didn't need serious number crunching. Maybe having such
things available would have speeded things up a bit. I don't see it
particularly accelerating electronics: Sure the difference engine's
mechanical, but so were tabulators, and IBM built an empire on them.
As with tabulators the DE might prove useful with the census. Perhaps
it would have lead to faster analyses of sanitation and health? Maybe.
It might have also lead to earlier firing direcors for warships.
Another example of mecanical computing. We it here, in front of
semi-conductor based electronic machines and it's easy to forget that
calculating engines worked perfectly well before such things were
invented.
Again, as with tabulators, an empire can be built on them. ICL, big
red, would be the dominant factor in computing, provided it was able
to shift from mechanical to electronic copmputers in the thirties.
------------------------------------------------------------
'And anyway I could use my chemicals on the cattle!
Joker-burgers!'
The Joker, explaining the true origin of BSE, in 1978
Barry DeCicco
The science and engineering of the period *had* to avoid things which
required numerical analysis, because it wasn't available. Given
improved computing, the course of science and engineering would have
changed drastically. Differential equations usually had to be solved
analytically. Being able to solve them numerically would have boosted
the dsign abilities of engineers. Also, they could have made
far better use of optimization methods.
> As with tabulators the DE might prove useful with the census. Perhaps
> it would have lead to faster analyses of sanitation and health? Maybe.
>
Yes - as a matter of fact, in the 1840's, one pioneering epidemiologist
linked cholera to particular water sources. He used exhaustive
surveys (of tens of thousands of households). He was able to stop
a couple of outbreaks. This was before the germ theory of disease.
Given tabulators, public health would have been affected.
> It might have also lead to earlier firing direcors for warships.
> Another example of mecanical computing. We it here, in front of
> semi-conductor based electronic machines and it's easy to forget that
> calculating engines worked perfectly well before such things were
> invented.
Which would have lead to serious military investment - if not
by Great Britain, then by others. Which would have, in turn,
led Great Britain to invest in them - if only to keep up with
the others.
Barry
p
Travers Naran
Barry DeCicco (bdec...@umich.edu) pontificated:
> Nick Eden wrote:
> >
> > dsg...@visi.com (Daniel Goodman) wrote:
> >
> > >In article <moo-040896...@sl14.midtown.net>,
> > >Bryan Cowan <m...@midtown.net> wrote:
> > >>In article <4u2kdf$m...@ccshst05.uoguelph.ca>, bga...@uoguelph.ca (Barry
> > >>Gaudet) wrote:
> > >>
> > >>> What if Babbage had actually built a functioning Analytical Engine?
> > >>>
> > >>> Would it have accelerated computer, and possibly, electrical/electronic
> > >>> development?
> > >>>
> > >>> Would it have led to a false path of steam driven 'engines'?
> > >>
> > >historical scholarship. Personally, I decided from reviews of _The
> > >Difference Engine_ that it was so distant from anything probable as not to
> > >be worth my reading. But maybe the authors _did_ manage to justify their
> > >premises.
No. They showed ignorance of Victorian England, the historical
figures they were writing about (Byron: pro-technology???) and the
actual problems of mechanical computing and the capabilities and
intentions of the Analytic Engine. That's just the beginning. :-)
> > I just don't know how it would have influenced science. Most science
> > of the period didn't need serious number crunching. Maybe having such
> > things available would have speeded things up a bit. I don't see it
> > particularly accelerating electronics: Sure the difference engine's
> > mechanical, but so were tabulators, and IBM built an empire on them.
>
> The science and engineering of the period *had* to avoid things which
> required numerical analysis, because it wasn't available. Given
> improved computing, the course of science and engineering would have
> changed drastically. Differential equations usually had to be solved
> analytically. Being able to solve them numerically would have boosted
> the dsign abilities of engineers. Also, they could have made
> far better use of optimization methods.
Not really. The Analytic Engine required a lot of skill to program
correctly, it also would have to be extended in several important ways
to make it useful for numerical analysis, e.g., a larger store for
intermediate results. If I recall (rather fuzzily), the intention was
to have a fair number of digits of precision (more than the difference
engine) and I forgot how many accumulators. But I seem to recall
discussions, and my own mental calculations, that it would not have
enough accumulators for the truly fiendishly complex computations,
like numerical differential equations. The accumulators would
represent the main memory storage of values used and generated by the
program, ala variables and intermediate results.
But even still, it would have been useful, but not as massively
revolutionary as electronic computers and calculators, which could
provide a large amount of number crunching functions without the
painful delays of mechanical operations. That last part got some lip
service from "The Difference Engine" [Gibson-Sterling], but all in
all, they seemed to think the Analytical Engine was the mechanical
analog of their desktop PC or UNIVAC. The AE couldn't provide enough
storage for stored program operation or information processing, but it
could provide some useful computational horsepower.
> > As with tabulators the DE might prove useful with the census. Perhaps
> > it would have lead to faster analyses of sanitation and health? Maybe.
>
> Yes - as a matter of fact, in the 1840's, one pioneering epidemiologist
> linked cholera to particular water sources. He used exhaustive
> surveys (of tens of thousands of households). He was able to stop
> a couple of outbreaks. This was before the germ theory of disease.
> Given tabulators, public health would have been affected.
Well, first off, the cost of the Analytic Engine would have been
pretty hefty. I find it hard to believe that more than one would be
built by anyone other than the government or a consortium of very big
businesses.
Secondly, the difficulty of programming the Analytic Engine seems to
get ignored. It was pretty fiendishly complicated and seemed more
related to microcode programming than modern machine code programming.
I would love to get my hands on Ada's programming manual (reprint or
otherwise). No one I've talked to seems to know if it has ever been
published in modern times. Oh, and there is some controversy about
how much of the manual Ada actually wrote -- many of Ada's detractors
like to point out letters from Babbage which spoon-fed her the actual
demonstration program.
> > It might have also lead to earlier firing direcors for warships.
> > Another example of mecanical computing. We it here, in front of
> > semi-conductor based electronic machines and it's easy to forget that
> > calculating engines worked perfectly well before such things were
> > invented.
>
> Which would have lead to serious military investment - if not
> by Great Britain, then by others. Which would have, in turn,
> led Great Britain to invest in them - if only to keep up with
> the others.
Again, the size, cost and difficulty of operating the machine gets
ignored. The difference engine would have been a better investment,
because it could generate vast volumes of tabular data based on
polynomial functions or piece-wise polynomial functions. Someone was
kind enough, several years ago, to send me a copy of his research he
did on the difference engine and analytic engine (sorry, lost in a
file-system purge many moons ago). There were several
scaled-down versions built and they did work, but they seemed to
suffer from mechanical problems.
Gibson & Stirling claimed in "The Difference Engine" that with the
Analytical Engine (and even with the Difference Engine), that the
advances in metalurgy caused would overcome the mechanical problems.
I have a big problem with that because my understanding of metalurgy
was that it required a revolution in chemistry (the periodic table)
before metalurgy could take advantage of the math.
There was a short-story in a "Best SF of the Year" collection from
just a few years ago with a really good story about someone finding a
completed engine in New Zealand and a missionary couple who built it
in order to -- that would spoil the story. :-)
Ah, I love it when this thread comes up. I can act as though I know
what I am talking about. :-)
Charles Dye
dsg...@visi.com (Daniel Goodman) wrote:
>>I believe that a few years ago cyberpunk writers William Gibson
>>(_Neuromancer_) and Bruce Sterling teamed up to write an AH novel based on
>>this very what if. The book is called _The Difference Engine_, and most
>>big bookstores should have a paperback copy.
>Which does not answer the question. A work of fiction is not a work of
>historical scholarship. Personally, I decided from reviews of _The
>Difference Engine_ that it was so distant from anything probable as not to
>be worth my reading. But maybe the authors _did_ manage to justify their
>premises.
The novel is wildly improbable, but I enjoyed it immensely. You'd
probably have to have a certain turn of mind, however. ("Turn"?
"Twist" ?)
Gibson and Sterling seem to have missed the significance of
Babbage's one successful invention: government grants for
scientific research! Yes, old Chuck B. was the one who started
all that.
Richard Treitel
>>> What if Babbage had actually built a functioning Analytical Engine?
>>>
>>> Would it have accelerated computer, and possibly, electrical/electronic
>>> development?
>>>
>>> Would it have led to a false path of steam driven 'engines'?
Almost certainly people would have started using compressed air or
electric motors if/when these appeared to have advantages over steam.
But that's a detail. My guess is that electronic valves ("tubes")
would have been developed anyway, used in radios for a while, and then
some bright spark would have made the connection, so that an ENIAC
might have been built in the 1920's. We might have had decades of
expensive, unreliable computers before the transistor and related
devices appeared (which, again, would probably have developed in about
the same way as in this timeline, since they depend on solid-state
physics). Possibly valve technology would have been driven to become
more reliable, but my guess is that the computer market wouldn't have
been big enough for that.
- Richard
------
What is (and isn't) ScF? ==> http://web.wco.com/~treitel/sf.html
Get PGP -- the government doesn't.
Barry Gaudet
Nick Eden (ni...@pheasnt.demon.co.uk) wrote:
[...]
: It might have also lead to earlier firing direcors for warships.
: Another example of mecanical computing. We it here, in front of
: semi-conductor based electronic machines and it's easy to forget that
: calculating engines worked perfectly well before such things were
: invented.
: Again, as with tabulators, an empire can be built on them. ICL, big
: red, would be the dominant factor in computing, provided it was able
: to shift from mechanical to electronic copmputers in the thirties.
Wasn't the Manhattan Project calculations intensive? Might WWII have
been a more nuclear war? With at least the US, Britian & Germany being
nuclear powers?
Robert A. Woodward
In article <19960805.7...@van-as-07c07.direct.ca>,
tna...@van-as-07c07.direct.ca (Travers Naran) wrote:
<SNIP!>
> Again, the size, cost and difficulty of operating the machine gets
> ignored. The difference engine would have been a better investment,
> because it could generate vast volumes of tabular data based on
> polynomial functions or piece-wise polynomial functions. Someone was
> kind enough, several years ago, to send me a copy of his research he
> did on the difference engine and analytic engine (sorry, lost in a
> file-system purge many moons ago). There were several
> scaled-down versions built and they did work, but they seemed to
> suffer from mechanical problems.
>
> Gibson & Stirling claimed in "The Difference Engine" that with the
> Analytical Engine (and even with the Difference Engine), that the
> advances in metalurgy caused would overcome the mechanical problems.
> I have a big problem with that because my understanding of metalurgy
> was that it required a revolution in chemistry (the periodic table)
> before metalurgy could take advantage of the math.
>
> There was a short-story in a "Best SF of the Year" collection from
> just a few years ago with a really good story about someone finding a
> completed engine in New Zealand and a missionary couple who built it
> in order to -- that would spoil the story. :-)
>
"Georgia on my Mind" by Charles Sheffield, title story of the collection
of that name soon to be reprinted by Tor, IIRC.
> Ah, I love it when this thread comes up. I can act as though I know
> what I am talking about. :-)
Travers Naran
Robert A. Woodward (robe...@halcyon.com) pontificated:
> In article <19960805.7...@van-as-07c07.direct.ca>,
> tna...@van-as-07c07.direct.ca (Travers Naran) wrote:
>
> <SNIP!>
>
> > just a few years ago with a really good story about someone finding a
> > completed engine in New Zealand and a missionary couple who built it
> > in order to -- that would spoil the story. :-)
> >
>
> of that name soon to be reprinted by Tor, IIRC.
That's the one!! Thank you for reminding me of it. Again, I would
recommend that short story to any Babbage machine affaciando as it is
very well detailed and a *damned* good read.
David Vanecek
It would seem that this what-if reduces to a smaller question:
"What if Babbage had paid attention to Boole's work?" Then
the difference and analytical engines could have been realized,
since they could have used binary numbers, which are much, much
easier to implement mechanically. Was Babbage aware of Boole?
I must agree with earlier posters who maintain that profound changes
would have resulted from a cost effective programmable calculator.
There were many problems in physics and engineering for which the
theoretical superstructure had been erected, in particular statistics
and differential equations. These problems were ultimately
tackled with mechanical calculators (in particular the hoary
Friden desk calculator, which I saw used for serious scientific
investigation as late as 1970).
DV
Chris Williams
In article <32078633.3050514@news>, ni...@pheasnt.demon.co.uk says...
>It's safe to assume that the RN would have made the investment. If the
>RN was committed to anything it was being top dog. Probably it would
>have been one of those things that made Imperial Computing Limited the
>world beater it is today.
Hmm. . .
Apart from the Dreadnought, RN policy from . . . well 1650 I suppose . . .
was to rely on better tactics, skill, and numbers. If you're top dog, what
you don't want to happen is for a technical advance to render your huge
fleet obsolete. You only take up innovations if somebody else has done so
already (torpedo, submarine, mine). So look out for the Admiralty (as long
as they can keep Fisher out) deliberatly stifling any hint of military
applications. But would Basil Zaharoff stand for it? I think not - maybe
there would be skulduggery afoot.
I see a better plot than Gibson and Sterling managed appearing here.
Chris
Nick Eden
tna...@van-as-07c07.direct.ca (Travers Naran) wrote:
>Barry DeCicco (bdec...@umich.edu) pontificated:
>> Yes - as a matter of fact, in the 1840's, one pioneering epidemiologist
>> linked cholera to particular water sources. He used exhaustive
>> surveys (of tens of thousands of households). He was able to stop
>> a couple of outbreaks. This was before the germ theory of disease.
>> Given tabulators, public health would have been affected.
>
>Well, first off, the cost of the Analytic Engine would have been
>pretty hefty. I find it hard to believe that more than one would be
>built by anyone other than the government or a consortium of very big
>businesses.
This was of course equally true of electronic computers 50 years ago,
and look at us now? I've got three in this room, one of which is
scattered in bits becayse it's not powerful enought and it would out
perform all the computers built in WWII alone.
If working Analytical Engines could have been built then the prices
would drop.
>Secondly, the difficulty of programming the Analytic Engine seems to
>get ignored. It was pretty fiendishly complicated and seemed more
>related to microcode programming than modern machine code programming.
>I would love to get my hands on Ada's programming manual (reprint or
>otherwise). No one I've talked to seems to know if it has ever been
>published in modern times. Oh, and there is some controversy about
>how much of the manual Ada actually wrote -- many of Ada's detractors
>like to point out letters from Babbage which spoon-fed her the actual
>demonstration program.
That's prototypes for you. By 1900 these petty differences would be
sorted.
>> > It might have also lead to earlier firing direcors for warships.
>> > Another example of mecanical computing. We it here, in front of
>> > semi-conductor based electronic machines and it's easy to forget that
>> > calculating engines worked perfectly well before such things were
>> > invented.
>>
>> Which would have lead to serious military investment - if not
>> by Great Britain, then by others. Which would have, in turn,
>> led Great Britain to invest in them - if only to keep up with
>> the others.
It's safe to assume that the RN would have made the investment. If the
RN was committed to anything it was being top dog. Probably it would
have been one of those things that made Imperial Computing Limited the
world beater it is today.
pyotr filipivich
bga...@uoguelph.ca (Barry Gaudet) writes:
}Nick Eden (ni...@pheasnt.demon.co.uk) wrote:
}[...]
}: It might have also lead to earlier firing direcors for warships.
}: Another example of mecanical computing. We it here, in front of
}: semi-conductor based electronic machines and it's easy to forget that
}: calculating engines worked perfectly well before such things were
}: invented.
}: Again, as with tabulators, an empire can be built on them. ICL, big
}: red, would be the dominant factor in computing, provided it was able
}: to shift from mechanical to electronic copmputers in the thirties.
} Wasn't the Manhattan Project calculations intensive? Might WWII have
}been a more nuclear war? With at least the US, Britian & Germany being
}nuclear powers?
Yes, Manhattan was calculation intensive. Feynmen has a mention of the
work they did in parallel processing in the computation room (typeing
pool for adding machines) and how different parts of the room were set
up for different sorts of calculations.
When they wanted to compute the proability of the A-Bomb
igniting the atomsphere, they took the calculations to Columbia and rant
them through the Eniac. Took four passes (wire the calculations, run
the routine, record the termination state, rewire the computr witht eh
next section, enter the results of the last run - repeat twice more and
there is your answer. Of course, today you can do this on on an
HP-41cv - in one pass.)
The big calculators were Defense Projects - the War Department had great
need for lots of tables of calculations. Everybody else just did it
long hand, or estimated with a slide rule.
If you build Babbages Difference Engine, who long before the invention
of the "Hollerreth Tabulator" - the forerunner to IBM, the creator of
the punch card and sundry goodies?
Combining the "fast" gathering of statisitics in the early 1800s with
the difference machine might lead to some interesting sociological
developments: epidemiology, actuary tables, etc. Economic modeling
might not be that far off.
tschus
pyotr
--
py...@halcyon.com Pyotr Filipivich here, Nikolai Petrovich in the SCA.
Two Questions:
"Who is John Galt?" is the easy one.
"Who hired Craig Livingstone?" is the hard one.
Travers Naran
Nick Eden (ni...@pheasnt.demon.co.uk) pontificated:
> tna...@van-as-07c07.direct.ca (Travers Naran) wrote:
>
> >Barry DeCicco (bdec...@umich.edu) pontificated:
>
> >> linked cholera to particular water sources. He used exhaustive
> >> surveys (of tens of thousands of households). He was able to stop
> >> a couple of outbreaks. This was before the germ theory of disease.
> >> Given tabulators, public health would have been affected.
> >
> >Well, first off, the cost of the Analytic Engine would have been
> >pretty hefty. I find it hard to believe that more than one would be
> >built by anyone other than the government or a consortium of very big
> >businesses.
>
> and look at us now? I've got three in this room, one of which is
> scattered in bits becayse it's not powerful enought and it would out
> perform all the computers built in WWII alone.
>
> If working Analytical Engines could have been built then the prices
> would drop.
NOT BY ANY STRETCH OF THE IMAGINATION! The Analytical Engine was a
fiendishly complex piece of clockwork. Mass production of an AE would
be next to impossible because of the complexity of the gearing (ever
*seen* repros of the blueprints?). Electronic Computers are very easy
to mass-produce, especially with the advent of IC manufacturing where
one could work on 50 or more chips with one step. As well, Electronic
Computers rely on electron-flow which is small and as a result,
shrinking down the circuits is not a big deal. The AE required metal
grinding against metal. It required extremely long transmission
lengths that needed very tough materials. That is very hard to
miniaturize with anything other than jewel based gears. Can you
imagine how many precious and semi-precious jewels would have to be
used make a single AE? The AE would be a top target for thieves even
stealing one small part of it because of the jeweling and the metal.
Silicon, aluminium, germanium and other doping materials are cheap;
high-tensile steel, jeweled gears and alloys ain't.
> >Secondly, the difficulty of programming the Analytic Engine seems to
> >get ignored. It was pretty fiendishly complicated and seemed more
> >related to microcode programming than modern machine code programming.
> >I would love to get my hands on Ada's programming manual (reprint or
> >otherwise). No one I've talked to seems to know if it has ever been
> >published in modern times. Oh, and there is some controversy about
> >how much of the manual Ada actually wrote -- many of Ada's detractors
> >like to point out letters from Babbage which spoon-fed her the actual
> >demonstration program.
>
> That's prototypes for you. By 1900 these petty differences would be
> sorted.
Petty differences..? I could see them developing the equivelant of
CISC architectures, but creating compilers that would run in a
reasonable amount of time I don't.
> >> > It might have also lead to earlier firing direcors for warships.
> >> > Another example of mecanical computing. We it here, in front of
> >> > semi-conductor based electronic machines and it's easy to forget that
> >> > calculating engines worked perfectly well before such things were
> >> > invented.
> >>
> >> Which would have lead to serious military investment - if not
> >> by Great Britain, then by others. Which would have, in turn,
> >> led Great Britain to invest in them - if only to keep up with
> >> the others.
>
> It's safe to assume that the RN would have made the investment. If the
> RN was committed to anything it was being top dog. Probably it would
> have been one of those things that made Imperial Computing Limited the
> world beater it is today.
Yes, if someone else had forked out the money to make a miniaturized
firing director and got it to work reliably on a rocking and rolling
ship during the heat of battle. But as I said in a previous post,
even the Difference Engine would have been a vast improvement. With
its ability to compute polynomial or piece-wise polynomial functions
reliably and directly inscribe them onto printing plates, it would
have made an invaluable aid to creating firing tables. If the DE
existed, it would have made WWI a *very* different war. Precision
mortar and artiliary attacks would have made "rolling thunder"
artiliary attacks available at the beginning of the war instead of at
the end of it. The horror of trench warfare would have been replaced
with almost blindingly fast attacks and defences (relative to trench
warfare). It would have been more like WWII than WWI, in my
slightly-informed opinion.
Now, WWI and WWII experts are free to tell me the *real* story if I
managed to really munge it. :-)
Travers Naran
David Vanecek (dvan...@third-wave.com) pontificated:
> It would seem that this what-if reduces to a smaller question:
> "What if Babbage had paid attention to Boole's work?" Then
> the difference and analytical engines could have been realized,
> since they could have used binary numbers, which are much, much
> easier to implement mechanically. Was Babbage aware of Boole?
I believe so. I seem to recall in my research on Babbage for an
undergrad paper that Boole and Babbage had many mutual acquantances
and that Boole was fairly well known for his primitive work with
boolean algebra. But most people don't realise that it wasn't until
ENIAC and whats-his-name that the Boolean Logic for arithmetic
operations was worked out. The idea of using Boole's algebra for
arithmetic computations would have required a leap of the imagination
IMHO.
As for binary being easier to implement mechanically, that isn't
exactly true. You need more binary elements than digit elements to
have the same effective computing power, as well as the manufacturing
ability around the time of Babbage was fairly primitive. Babbage had
to invent a whole bunch of new tools to create many of the components
of the Difference Engine. Of course, IMHO, the metalworker Babbage
hired to work for him shares 50% of the blame for the failure of the
Difference Engine's full completion. Being able to accurately
manufacture the many components required for a boolean version would
have been like going to the moon, engineering wise.
> I must agree with earlier posters who maintain that profound changes
> would have resulted from a cost effective programmable calculator.
> There were many problems in physics and engineering for which the
> theoretical superstructure had been erected, in particular statistics
> and differential equations. These problems were ultimately
> tackled with mechanical calculators (in particular the hoary
> Friden desk calculator, which I saw used for serious scientific
> investigation as late as 1970).
I agree with the first part. My claim is the Difference and Analytic
Engines were not cost effective, not very programmable but did
calculate. But most people forget that Leibnetz, among others, had
created some very effective mechanical calculators but had generally
been ignored because the people involved just didn't see the need for
a mechanical contrivance that did the same work they could do on
paper. Can't blame them because the contrivances were little more
than non-automatic mechanical desk calculators and just did the basic
operations. The time to use it properly probably seemed like a waste
of time.
If an easier to use mech-calculator, like your old Friden or maybe a
sturdy IBM machine, was available, then we would have seen some
technological advances, but the scientific advances still required
thinking breakthroughs rather than computational. It wasn't until
more of science became quantized, like fluid dynamics, that the
breakthroughs would have really started to pour in.
Lester John Ness
Is it fair to call the abacus or the mechanical clock a digital
computer? Is it fair to call the celestial globe, the astrolabe, the
quadrant, analog computers?
--
Lester Ness ln...@indiana.edu
Barry DeCicco
Then again, how much did the 1945-55 generation of computers cost?
They had rooms full of vaccuum tubes (which burned out like popcorn,
requiring the constant services of technicians), miles of complex wiring,
a *lot* of switches and cables, which were used for programming.
The languages were machinge-specific, and remained so until FORTRAN
was invented (anyone recall when that was?).
Still, they were produced in relatively large numbers, for such
a monstrosity of a machine, and utilized eagerly. And the fact that
they were so useful spurred government and industry to pump large amounts
of money into making them better, which started the cycle which led
to what we have now.
> > >Secondly, the difficulty of programming the Analytic Engine seems to
> > >get ignored. It was pretty fiendishly complicated and seemed more
> > >related to microcode programming than modern machine code programming.
> > >I would love to get my hands on Ada's programming manual (reprint or
> > >otherwise). No one I've talked to seems to know if it has ever been
> > >published in modern times. Oh, and there is some controversy about
> > >how much of the manual Ada actually wrote -- many of Ada's detractors
> > >like to point out letters from Babbage which spoon-fed her the actual
> > >demonstration program.
See above - until FOTRAN was invented (IIRC), all computing was done
on machine-specific language. It wasn't pretty, but it was done.
> >
> > That's prototypes for you. By 1900 these petty differences would be
> > sorted.
>
> Petty differences..? I could see them developing the equivelant of
> CISC architectures, but creating compilers that would run in a
> reasonable amount of time I don't.
>
> > >> > It might have also lead to earlier firing direcors for warships.
> > >> > Another example of mecanical computing. We it here, in front of
> > >> > semi-conductor based electronic machines and it's easy to forget that
> > >> > calculating engines worked perfectly well before such things were
> > >> > invented.
> > >>
> > >> Which would have lead to serious military investment - if not
> > >> by Great Britain, then by others. Which would have, in turn,
> > >> led Great Britain to invest in them - if only to keep up with
> > >> the others.
> >
> > It's safe to assume that the RN would have made the investment. If the
> > RN was committed to anything it was being top dog. Probably it would
> > have been one of those things that made Imperial Computing Limited the
> > world beater it is today.
>
Good question - the computing power would have really helped the RN,
but they were already top dogs, and (from my casual reading), the admirals
figured that being *just like* Nelson (with steam power added) would keep
them there, just like it had got them there (remember Churchill's saying, that
the only traditions of the RN were "Rum sodomy and the lash!"?).
> Yes, if someone else had forked out the money to make a miniaturized
> firing director and got it to work reliably on a rocking and rolling
> ship during the heat of battle. But as I said in a previous post,
> even the Difference Engine would have been a vast improvement. With
> its ability to compute polynomial or piece-wise polynomial functions
> reliably and directly inscribe them onto printing plates, it would
> have made an invaluable aid to creating firing tables. If the DE
> existed, it would have made WWI a *very* different war. Precision
> mortar and artiliary attacks would have made "rolling thunder"
> artiliary attacks available at the beginning of the war instead of at
> the end of it. The horror of trench warfare would have been replaced
> with almost blindingly fast attacks and defences (relative to trench
> warfare). It would have been more like WWII than WWI, in my
> slightly-informed opinion.
>
> Now, WWI and WWII experts are free to tell me the *real* story if I
> managed to really munge it. :-)
BTW - I am ignorant of the differences betwen the analytical machine, and
the difference engine. Most of my remarks have concerned the generic usefulness
of mechanical computing.
As for how it could have helped the RN - it wouldn't have needed to be
ship-portable. Making firing tables would be one use. Others would be
to aid engineers in designing better boilers, engines, ship hulls, guns,
and other mechanical equipment. Things like power-to-weight ratios
are very nice for making better warships.
Barry
p
David Vanecek
Travers Naran (tna...@van-as-03a16.direct.ca) hierophanted:
: David Vanecek (dvan...@third-wave.com) pontificated:
[snippage ]
: As for binary being easier to implement mechanically, that isn't
: exactly true. You need more binary elements than digit elements to
: have the same effective computing power, as well as the manufacturing
: ability around the time of Babbage was fairly primitive. Babbage had
: to invent a whole bunch of new tools to create many of the components
: of the Difference Engine. Of course, IMHO, the metalworker Babbage
: hired to work for him shares 50% of the blame for the failure of the
agree -- he was surly and didn't believe Babbage's requirements.
: Difference Engine's full completion. Being able to accurately
: manufacture the many components required for a boolean version would
: have been like going to the moon, engineering wise.
Well...my impression of the failure of the engines was that they were
due to the bizarre linkages, cogwheels, whatever... to effect
decimal arithmetic. (look inside a Friden for a real treat.)
Binary is much more forgiving. It could be done with some kind of
flip-flop that could be made imprecisely.
Something is either left or right, or up or down. I would think you
could make it out of stamped parts. It's so much easier to
make a component that must be in either of two states than in one
of ten.
: If an easier to use mech-calculator, like your old Friden or maybe a
: sturdy IBM machine, was available, then we would have seen some
: technological advances, but the scientific advances still required
: thinking breakthroughs rather than computational. It wasn't until
You're right. Look at the sterility of science given current computational
ability. Well, not sterile, but certainly stunted. What have we
really done with all these cheap MIPS? I'll suspend judgement for
another ten years, should I live so long.
: more of science became quantized, like fluid dynamics, that the
Is there an unquantized science? [ Just a troll! Just a troll! ]
: breakthroughs would have really started to pour in.
Well, there was astronomy and thermodynamics, and statistics and
what else? Optics? Perhaps the absence of cheap calculators was more
of a blessing in that it encouraged analytic solutions and elegant
approximations. Recent "computer" proofs and methods have a sort
of boring sameness to them, a brutality that does not titillate
the esthetic sense. One may contrast the brute-force raytracing
method of optical design with the elegance of pre-computer algebraic
methods. Both gave good optics, and I daresay a boner as horrid
as the Hubble Howler would probably have not occured if, say,
a pre-computer designer were in charge; computers can breed a fatal
hubris. I think I'm agreeing with you.
D.V.
--
Am I a Luddite yet?
John Moreno
Travers Naran <tna...@van-as-03a16.direct.ca> wrote:
] Nick Eden (ni...@pheasnt.demon.co.uk) pontificated:
] > tna...@van-as-07c07.direct.ca (Travers Naran) wrote:
] >
] > >Barry DeCicco (bdec...@umich.edu) pontificated:
] >
] > >> Yes - as a matter of fact, in the 1840's, one pioneering
] > >> epidemiologist linked cholera to particular water sources. He
] > >> used exhaustive surveys (of tens of thousands of households). He
] > >> was able to stop a couple of outbreaks. This was before the germ
] > >> theory of disease.
] > >> Given tabulators, public health would have been affected.
] > >
] > >Well, first off, the cost of the Analytic Engine would have been
] > >pretty hefty. I find it hard to believe that more than one would
] > >be built by anyone other than the government or a consortium of
] > >very big businesses.
] >
] > This was of course equally true of electronic computers 50 years
] > ago, and look at us now? I've got three in this room, one of which
] > is scattered in bits becayse it's not powerful enought and it would
] > out perform all the computers built in WWII alone.
] >
] > If working Analytical Engines could have been built then the prices
] > would drop.
]
] NOT BY ANY STRETCH OF THE IMAGINATION! The Analytical Engine was a
] fiendishly complex piece of clockwork. Mass production of an AE would
-snip-
Didn't the Smithstonia BUILD the Difference Machine a couple of years
ago. If anybody knows anything about it I'd like to hear it.
--
John Moreno
Justin Fang
In article <3209FAA7...@umich.edu>,
Barry DeCicco <bdec...@umich.edu> wrote:
>Travers Naran wrote:
>> Nick Eden (ni...@pheasnt.demon.co.uk) pontificated:
>> > If working Analytical Engines could have been built then the prices
>> > would drop.
>> NOT BY ANY STRETCH OF THE IMAGINATION! The Analytical Engine was a
>> fiendishly complex piece of clockwork. Mass production of an AE would
>> be next to impossible because of the complexity of the gearing (ever
>> *seen* repros of the blueprints?).
>> Silicon, aluminium, germanium and other doping materials are cheap;
>> high-tensile steel, jeweled gears and alloys ain't.
Actually, integrated-quality silicon is *not* cheap; it has to be
monocrystalline and very pure. Forunately you don't need much of it per
chip.
>Then again, how much did the 1945-55 generation of computers cost?
>They had rooms full of vaccuum tubes (which burned out like popcorn,
>requiring the constant services of technicians), miles of complex wiring,
>a *lot* of switches and cables, which were used for programming.
>The languages were machinge-specific, and remained so until FORTRAN
>was invented (anyone recall when that was?).
>Still, they were produced in relatively large numbers, for such
>a monstrosity of a machine, and utilized eagerly. And the fact that
>they were so useful spurred government and industry to pump large amounts
>of money into making them better, which started the cycle which led
>to what we have now.
Which is computers that are based on transistors, not vacuum tubes. Note
that computers did not start to become really widespread until the invention
of the integrated circuit. You need quantum mechanics before you can even
think of the transistor, and you need a whole bunch of stuff to make the IC
possible. I don't think Babbage computers will speed up the development of
QM much.
On the other hand, some of the theoretical work on computer architechure,
like that done by Turing and Von Neumann, is not very technolgically
dependent. That could be thought up much eariler, if there was a reason to.
My guess is that the effect of use of the Babbage engines on computer
technology would be to speed up the development of modern computers by 10,
maybe 20 years. Which, when you think about how fast computer technology is
advancing nowadays, is not a trivial feat.
[military use of difference and analytical engines]
On a sidenote, I've been told that one model of Soviet fighter jet had a
mechanical analog navigation computer, capable of solving three-dimensional
systems of differential eqautions, as a backup in case EMP took out the
electronic one.
--
Justin Fang (jus...@ugcs.caltech.edu)
This space intentionally left blank.
Graham Head
In article <320649aa.10419509@news>, Nick Eden
<ni...@pheasnt.demon.co.uk> writes
>dsg...@visi.com (Daniel Goodman) wrote:
>
>>In article <moo-040896...@sl14.midtown.net>,
>>Bryan Cowan <m...@midtown.net> wrote:
>>>In article <4u2kdf$m...@ccshst05.uoguelph.ca>, bga...@uoguelph.ca
(Barry
>>>Gaudet) wrote:
>>>
>>>I believe that a few years ago cyberpunk writers William Gibson
>>>(_Neuromancer_) and Bruce Sterling teamed up to write an AH novel
based on
>>>this very what if. The book is called _The Difference Engine_, and
most
>>>big bookstores should have a paperback copy.
>>
[Snip]
>
>The book's ghastly. Don't bother looking for it. Hell, if you really
>want to send me the postage and I'll mail you my copy (since I'm in
>the UK and you're not it's probably not that worthwhile a suggestion.)
>
Oh. I quite liked it. Let me think why...
[SPOILERS}
First off, the image of the steam-driven computers I found quite funny;
and the sublime imagery patterned around it. I loved several of the
jokes about the altered lives of famous people (Marx, Engels (made me
laugh out loud), Keats, etc). Much more wittily done than with many
books. The use of Disraeli's _Sybil_ added depth and resonance to
several events earlier in the book, I thought, and raised interesting
and somewhat unexopected historiographic questions. As far as I could
tell, Sterling had done his research reasonably well. Also, I liked the
idea that the driving force was Byron's wife, not Byron himself (& that
also answers in part the poster who read the novel as presenting an
unlikely pro-tehnology Byron).
As far as the technology was concerned, I didn't get the sense that G&S
(!-just noticed that...) were taking it _that_ seriously; it wasn't
intended as very hard sf.
That the book does have serious flaws, I will admit. The chase sequence
across London towards the end becomes too much of a travelogue; it grows
tedious and dull. There is a slight tendency to the Dick Van Dyke
school of Londoner ('Gawd luv yer Mary!'); there are touches of what
could be called anti-Orientalism bordering on racism (based on past
practice I'll ascribe that to Gibson); the apotheosis of the Difference
Engine is irritating, and unconvincing as the revealed MacGuffin of the
main plot; and I agree with John Clute's argument about the crucial
absence of Dickens as a possible resisting voice- the text feels
monolithic.
But I enjoyed it...
--
Graham Head
Travers Naran
Barry DeCicco (bdec...@umich.edu) pontificated:
But you are ignoring the fundamental problem -- the Analytical Engine
was a mind bogglingly complex piece of mechanical clock-work. You
cannot analogize mechanical devices with electronic and electrical
devices. To me, you seem to be thinking that because it was easy to
go from the Vacuum Tube to the transistor to the IC that there would
be a mechanical analog, and there just isn't. The Analytical Engine
bear almost an accidental resemblance in its final functionality to
ENIAC and more importantly, bears a _passing_ resemblance architecture
wise to modern computers. You cannot compare the potential evolution
of the Analytical Engine to the electronic computer because they
simply are not the same beast inside. You are comparing techniques
for growing fruit with techniques for open-heart surgery. Mechanical
technology is very different from electrical and electonic technology.
That is why the development of electricity was the single most
important event in Western history.
There was no mechanical equivelant of the transistor to replace the
complexity of the gearing required. Even into the modern era,
mechanical calculators had not radically improved upon the gearing
systems used for the previous 100+ years. I just see no evidence that
the Analytical Engine would have dropped in price. We would have seen
the fulfilment of the prophecy given to the Electronic Computer:
Only a handful of computers will ever be required to fulfill the
computational needs of the entire world.
Without the massive price drop and exponential increase in computing
power of the electronic computer, the Analytical Engine would never
had moved beyond performing numerical computations into the most
important field people use it for today -- symbolic computing.
> > > >Secondly, the difficulty of programming the Analytic Engine seems to
> > > >get ignored. It was pretty fiendishly complicated and seemed more
> > > >related to microcode programming than modern machine code programming.
> > > >I would love to get my hands on Ada's programming manual (reprint or
> > > >otherwise). No one I've talked to seems to know if it has ever been
> > > >published in modern times. Oh, and there is some controversy about
> > > >how much of the manual Ada actually wrote -- many of Ada's detractors
> > > >like to point out letters from Babbage which spoon-fed her the actual
> > > >demonstration program.
>
> See above - until FOTRAN was invented (IIRC), all computing was done
> on machine-specific language. It wasn't pretty, but it was done.
Yes. Do you also know the stories of companies spending nearly $1
million in development costs to create an application in a
machine-specific language and then having the application NOT work at
all? The stories of huge programs written in machine-language and the
programmers unable to find out why the program was malfunctioning at
all? Computers did not become widely useful until the first compiled
languages started to appear. FORTRAN wasn't the first (I am sorry,
but I cannot recall what the experimental first compilers were called)
compiler, but it the first commercially available compiler followed
shortly thereafter by COBOL. It cannot be understated how important
FORTRAN and COBOL are to the history of computer development and to
the history computers have made in the world. There is a reason why
some old-timers in computing science treat Grace Hopper as nigh on a
God up there with Alan Turing.
> > > It's safe to assume that the RN would have made the investment. If the
> > > RN was committed to anything it was being top dog. Probably it would
> > > have been one of those things that made Imperial Computing Limited the
> > > world beater it is today.
>
> Good question - the computing power would have really helped the RN,
> but they were already top dogs, and (from my casual reading), the admirals
> figured that being *just like* Nelson (with steam power added) would keep
> them there, just like it had got them there (remember Churchill's saying, that
> the only traditions of the RN were "Rum sodomy and the lash!"?).
Exactly. Babbage had that problem when he went to the British
government with his proposal and had mentioned many of the
applications we are talking about here. The British government
thought the cost of it (which I think worked out to be as much as a
new battleship for the Analytical Engine) was no where near worth the
returns.
> > Yes, if someone else had forked out the money to make a miniaturized
> > firing director and got it to work reliably on a rocking and rolling
> > ship during the heat of battle. But as I said in a previous post,
> > even the Difference Engine would have been a vast improvement. With
> > its ability to compute polynomial or piece-wise polynomial functions
> > reliably and directly inscribe them onto printing plates, it would
> > have made an invaluable aid to creating firing tables. If the DE
> > existed, it would have made WWI a *very* different war. Precision
> > mortar and artiliary attacks would have made "rolling thunder"
> > artiliary attacks available at the beginning of the war instead of at
> > the end of it. The horror of trench warfare would have been replaced
> > with almost blindingly fast attacks and defences (relative to trench
> > warfare). It would have been more like WWII than WWI, in my
> > slightly-informed opinion.
> >
> > Now, WWI and WWII experts are free to tell me the *real* story if I
> > managed to really munge it. :-)
>
> BTW - I am ignorant of the differences betwen the analytical machine, and
> the difference engine. Most of my remarks have concerned the generic usefulness
> of mechanical computing.
It is important to understand what the nature of mechanical computing
is before drawing deep conclusions. People seem to believe the
Analytical Engine would have been a magical machine that is like a
modern computer. It wasn't. It had a lot of potential to do some
truly neat things, but the original design Babbage was creating was
extremely modest. He had to because even his scaled down versions,
what little he did of it, was a massively complicated piece of
clock-work. The bits of it that were built, and then later scattered
to the four corners of the Earth, did actually work well for the small
components it provided, but those bits took a lifetime to build.
BRIEF LECTURE ON DIFFERENCE AND ANALYTICAL ENGINES
The Difference Engine was a much simpler device that provided what we
would concider simple calculator operations. What it really was is a
number sequence generator that could work with up to 4th order, IIRC,
polynomial equations. It used the school-child's method of fiding the
next number in a sequence by taking the difference between two
succesive numbers in a sequence and then finding the difference
between the differences. You may laugh, but it is a very powerful
numerical tool for generating large lists or tables of polynomial
outputs. Babbage even had an error accumulator that would alert the
operator when then error became to large for the initial set of data
then the next set of initial data could be entered.
The Analytical Engine is to the Difference Engine what a Cray is to a
child's calculator in terms of building it. In functional terms, the
AE was a MARK I with control instructions. Basically more like ENIAC
was. It could not store the program in its own "memory" or storage
racks, but it could run it off a set of punched cards inspired by the
Jacquarde loom. It had accumulators, a control unit, and what we
would today call an Arithmetic-Logic Unit. It had the basic
architecture of a Von Neumann machine almost a century before Von
Neumann wrote up the famous manual. It was also fiendishly complex.
About 6 or 7 years ago, some people created a computer model of the
Analytical Engine from the blueprints of Charles Babbage. Everyone
seem surprised and happy the machine would have actually worked. For
us Charles Babbage fans, we never had any doubts. The man was a
mechanical genius. He knew the basics of modularity and ensuring the
clock-works would work accurately and properly when interconnected
with each other.
About 3 years ago or so, some people came together to build Babbage's
difference engine for a museum display. Wonder of wonders, it worked
as per his original design and specs. I've heard scattered rumors of
people wanting to build the analytical engine in reality. I know
several replicas of _components_ of the AE were built for industry
museums around the world, but to the best of my knowledge, no
full-scale AE has ever been attempted yet.
> As for how it could have helped the RN - it wouldn't have needed to be
> ship-portable. Making firing tables would be one use. Others would be
> to aid engineers in designing better boilers, engines, ship hulls, guns,
> and other mechanical equipment. Things like power-to-weight ratios
> are very nice for making better warships.
Um, well I think the Analytical Engine would have been severe overkill
for those applications, but yes, there would have a use, but I doubt
it would have radically altered society or are present day technology.
The most radical changes in our society due to science and technology
has been the ideas or the intellectual breakthroughs rather than just
the number-crunching. Now adays, number crunching is the only way we
get new scientific discoveries.
David Johnson
Graham Head <Gra...@nunhead.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>Oh. I quite liked it. Let me think why...
Really? I found it lacking in essentials - such as a plot and an
ending - myself...
David
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
"Parapsychology is to Magic what
'Creation Science' is to the book of Genesis"
David Johnson - djohnson...@worldnet.att.net or joh...@www.rh.cc.ca.us
Home Page - www.geocities.com/SoHo/2019
Travers Naran
John Moreno (phe...@interpath.com) pontificated:
> Travers Naran <tna...@van-as-03a16.direct.ca> wrote:
>
> ] Nick Eden (ni...@pheasnt.demon.co.uk) pontificated:
> ] > tna...@van-as-07c07.direct.ca (Travers Naran) wrote:
> ] >
> ] > >Barry DeCicco (bdec...@umich.edu) pontificated:
> ] > This was of course equally true of electronic computers 50 years
> ] > ago, and look at us now? I've got three in this room, one of which
> ] > is scattered in bits becayse it's not powerful enought and it would
> ] > out perform all the computers built in WWII alone.
> ] >
> ] > If working Analytical Engines could have been built then the prices
> ] > would drop.
> ]
> ] NOT BY ANY STRETCH OF THE IMAGINATION! The Analytical Engine was a
> ] fiendishly complex piece of clockwork. Mass production of an AE would
>
> Didn't the Smithstonia BUILD the Difference Machine a couple of years
> ago. If anybody knows anything about it I'd like to hear it.
I canna remember if the Smithsonian did it as well, but the British
Museum of {something or other} hired a bunch of Ph.D's to build one.
They wrote up their experiences in a Scientific American article.
Now several points:
1. The Difference Engine was a *very* different invention from
the Analytical Engine (some confusion in this thread about that).
2. The Difference Engine had been built in Babbage's time to
various scales; the originally dreamed of version wasn't completed
mostly due to a, IM-not-so-HO, scoundrel Babbage hired to help
him build it. Babbage designed some very high precision tools and
paid for their construction, but his hired machinist tried to
abscond with them and won a lawsuit to own them (despite the fact
Babbage paid for and designed them).
3. Recently, due to a lot of interest, the Difference Engine had
been built, but the full Analytical Engine has never been built.
_Pieces_ have been built, but no whole AE was ever built.
4. The AE was constructed as a computer simulation by some
University and proved it worked (Don't know who -- damned PBS
documentary didn't think it was important for some reason).
Travers Naran
David Vanecek (dvan...@third-wave.com) pontificated:
> Travers Naran (tna...@van-as-03a16.direct.ca) hierophanted:
> : David Vanecek (dvan...@third-wave.com) pontificated:
>
> [snippage ]
> : As for binary being easier to implement mechanically, that isn't
> : exactly true. You need more binary elements than digit elements to
> : have the same effective computing power, as well as the manufacturing
> : ability around the time of Babbage was fairly primitive. Babbage had
> : to invent a whole bunch of new tools to create many of the components
> : of the Difference Engine. Of course, IMHO, the metalworker Babbage
> : hired to work for him shares 50% of the blame for the failure of the
> agree -- he was surly and didn't believe Babbage's requirements.
>
> : Difference Engine's full completion. Being able to accurately
> : manufacture the many components required for a boolean version would
> : have been like going to the moon, engineering wise.
>
> Well...my impression of the failure of the engines was that they were
> due to the bizarre linkages, cogwheels, whatever... to effect
> decimal arithmetic. (look inside a Friden for a real treat.)
> Binary is much more forgiving. It could be done with some kind of
> flip-flop that could be made imprecisely.
> Something is either left or right, or up or down. I would think you
> could make it out of stamped parts. It's so much easier to
> make a component that must be in either of two states than in one
> of ten.
No, the failure of the engines was due to a British Government getting
angry and bothered at the massive amount of money they pumped into the
Difference Engine and still had not gotten any results. A lot of
that, IMHO, was the problems Babbage had with the machinist he had
hired. But the "bizarre linkages" weren't for the Difference Engine;
the cogwheels did have problems that the alloys of the time really
weren't strong enough or weren't easy to work with. Cutting steel was
still extremely difficult and brass cogwheels had a short life time.
As for mechanical flip-flops, they have a nasty habit of wearing out.
See for example the telephone relay systems originally used in early
electro-mech computers. There were also mechanical mis-fires and
problems that would just make an electro-mech engineer shudder. Older
telephone exchanges in the world still use electro-mech telephone
relays and when they are put under a lot of load, they tend to
mis-step and mis-connect.
All in all, I don't see flip-flops being mechanically easier than
direct gearing. Either way, gearing is involved and that is the weak
link in the chain.
> : If an easier to use mech-calculator, like your old Friden or maybe a
> : sturdy IBM machine, was available, then we would have seen some
> : technological advances, but the scientific advances still required
> : thinking breakthroughs rather than computational. It wasn't until
>
> You're right. Look at the sterility of science given current computational
> ability. Well, not sterile, but certainly stunted. What have we
> really done with all these cheap MIPS? I'll suspend judgement for
> another ten years, should I live so long.
>
> : more of science became quantized, like fluid dynamics, that the
>
> Is there an unquantized science? [ Just a troll! Just a troll! ]
>
> : breakthroughs would have really started to pour in.
>
> Well, there was astronomy and thermodynamics, and statistics and
> what else? Optics? Perhaps the absence of cheap calculators was more
> of a blessing in that it encouraged analytic solutions and elegant
> approximations. Recent "computer" proofs and methods have a sort
> of boring sameness to them, a brutality that does not titillate
> the esthetic sense. One may contrast the brute-force raytracing
> method of optical design with the elegance of pre-computer algebraic
> methods. Both gave good optics, and I daresay a boner as horrid
> as the Hubble Howler would probably have not occured if, say,
> a pre-computer designer were in charge; computers can breed a fatal
> hubris. I think I'm agreeing with you.
I agree. Part of this comes out when we look at ancient
civilizations and wonder how they did it without computers, machines,
etc. we forget how lazy computers, machines, etc. have made us.
Without these wonderful aids, humans had to think smarter and come up
with some very charming, elegant systems for solving these problems.
Even down to just having good ol' fashioned human experience and
intelligence.
That is why I like Charles Babbage's efforts and I am a great admirer of
his. I also like historical mathematics seeing how earlier
mathematicians had to do without numerical techniques to solve their
really hard problems. I am amazed at the wonderful systems they came
up with to do very hard calculations. Most people now adays forget
logarithms were invented mostly to do very big multiplications and
divisions.
As for being a Luddite, I am a comp-sci graduate and will soon be
working as a computer programmer. My favorite posession in an abacus
and instruction manual I found at a local bookstore. I still use the
abacus for relatively simple calculation. I just *love* the idea of
the abacus -- it is so simple and elegant. It forces me to use my
mind and sharpen my arithmetic skills.
Some people dream of working on antique airplanes; I dream of working
on an amatuer project to build the Analytical Engine.
Glenn Crawford
> >I believe that a few years ago cyberpunk writers William Gibson
> >(_Neuromancer_) and Bruce Sterling teamed up to write an AH novel based on
> >this very what if. The book is called _The Difference Engine_, and most
> >big bookstores should have a paperback copy.
And it was dull book indeed, it read like any other cyberpunk novel of
"the near future"
Travers Naran
Glenn Crawford (ma...@hotstar.net) pontificated:
You know, in all my postings I had forgotten the single biggest reason
I hated the book was that after 200+ pages of long you were left with
no reason to have actually spent the time to *read* the book! It left
one with the big question:
Why did I waste a week of my life reading this damned book?
Bruce Sterling novels don't seem to be anywhere near as good as his
short stories ("Heavy Weather" is another example) and William Gibson
has really gone down hill since the publication of "Neuromancer".
After that, even his sequels to Neuromancer had little to no point to
justify even their pulpy existence. After reading _Count Zero_ and
_Mona Lisa Overdrive_, I still had no idea what I was supposed to get
from the book, because after God knows how many hours spent reading
them I just couldn't see the point of reading them.
Barry Gaudet
Lester John Ness (ln...@ucs.indiana.edu) wrote:
: Is it fair to call the abacus or the mechanical clock a digital
: computer? Is it fair to call the celestial globe, the astrolabe, the
: quadrant, analog computers?
Dunno. In a Programming Languages course I took the prof considered the
first programming language to be the Babylonian clay tablet record
keeping system, I guess it depends on how broad or narrow you want your
definition to be.
Loki
In ashen ink, Travers Naran (tna...@van-as-08c07.direct.ca) inscribed:
: languages started to appear. FORTRAN wasn't the first (I am sorry,
: but I cannot recall what the experimental first compilers were called)
Well, one of the first real language pioneers was Konrad Zuse, but his
language (Plankalkul) was never implemented, nor did anyone else really
know of it, (designed in Germany in 1945), so it basically is unconnected
to the remaining world of computer languages.
If you leave that aside, you have 'Short Code' (by John Mauchly, in 1949,
for the BINAC), Speedcoding (a number of people, including Backus, 1954),
the UNIVAC "Compiling System" (1951-1953, Grace Hopper, at Univac)
After that, Fortran jumps into the picture.
(Source for the above--no, my memory isn't -that- good--:
_Concepts of Programming Languages_, Robert W. Sebesta
I couldn't remember how to spell Zuse, so I decided to look it up an'
spit out my findings.)
: would today call an Arithmetic-Logic Unit. It had the basic
: architecture of a Von Neumann machine almost a century before Von
: Neumann wrote up the famous manual. It was also fiendishly complex.
Erm. Isn't that the Von Neuman architecture, and -not- the Von Neuman
Machine? IIRC, the VNM is the self-replicating machine, unrelated to the
VNA.
- Loki
--
+------------------+----------------------------------------------+
| Geoffrey Wiseman | http://tdg.uoguelph.ca/~ontarion/users/geoff |
+------------------+----------------------------------------------+
"After decades of your pain, this will seem like a memory of heaven."
Loki
In ashen ink, Travers Naran (tna...@van-as-07b05.direct.ca) inscribed:
: short stories ("Heavy Weather" is another example) and William Gibson
: has really gone down hill since the publication of "Neuromancer".
: After that, even his sequels to Neuromancer had little to no point to
: justify even their pulpy existence. After reading _Count Zero_ and
: _Mona Lisa Overdrive_, I still had no idea what I was supposed to get
: from the book, because after God knows how many hours spent reading
: them I just couldn't see the point of reading them.
YMMV. I'm not a huge fan of _Virtual Light_, but the _Neuromancer_
trilogy is wonderful, end-to-end, IMO.
- Loki
--
+------------------+----------------------------------------------+
| Geoffrey Wiseman | http://tdg.uoguelph.ca/~ontarion/users/geoff |
+------------------+----------------------------------------------+
"Undoubtedly, none of these opinions are my own, let alone anyone else's."
Norman L. DeForest
[references snipped as news-reader objected to them]
John Moreno (phe...@interpath.com) wrote:
: Travers Naran <tna...@van-as-03a16.direct.ca> wrote:
: ] Nick Eden (ni...@pheasnt.demon.co.uk) pontificated:
: ] > tna...@van-as-07c07.direct.ca (Travers Naran) wrote:
[snip]
: ] > >Well, first off, the cost of the Analytic Engine would have been
: ] > >pretty hefty. I find it hard to believe that more than one would
: ] > >be built by anyone other than the government or a consortium of
: ] > >very big businesses.
: ] >
: ] > This was of course equally true of electronic computers 50 years
: ] > ago, and look at us now? I've got three in this room, one of which
: ] > is scattered in bits becayse it's not powerful enought and it would
: ] > out perform all the computers built in WWII alone.
: ] >
: ] > If working Analytical Engines could have been built then the prices
: ] > would drop.
: ]
: ] NOT BY ANY STRETCH OF THE IMAGINATION! The Analytical Engine was a
: ] fiendishly complex piece of clockwork. Mass production of an AE would
: -snip-
: Didn't the Smithstonia BUILD the Difference Machine a couple of years
: ago. If anybody knows anything about it I'd like to hear it.
There was something about it in "Scientific American". Check the back
issues at your local public library.
Helpfully yours -- Norman De Forest
af...@ccn.cs.dal.ca
http://www.ccn.cs.dal.ca/~af380/Profile.html
--
Norman L. DeForest
Barry Gaudet (bga...@uoguelph.ca) wrote:
I often point to my abacus on my shelf when I have visitors and tell them
it is my "backup system" in case there's a power failure and can't use my
computers. When queried on the practicality of that, I just point to my
slide rule and say, "I've also got a floating-point coprocessor."
Travers Naran
Loki (gwis...@uoguelph.ca) pontificated:
> In ashen ink, Travers Naran (tna...@van-as-08c07.direct.ca) inscribed:
> : languages started to appear. FORTRAN wasn't the first (I am sorry,
> : but I cannot recall what the experimental first compilers were called)
>
> language (Plankalkul) was never implemented, nor did anyone else really
> know of it, (designed in Germany in 1945), so it basically is unconnected
> to the remaining world of computer languages.
>
> If you leave that aside, you have 'Short Code' (by John Mauchly, in 1949,
> for the BINAC), Speedcoding (a number of people, including Backus, 1954),
> the UNIVAC "Compiling System" (1951-1953, Grace Hopper, at Univac)
>
> After that, Fortran jumps into the picture.
>
> (Source for the above--no, my memory isn't -that- good--:
> _Concepts of Programming Languages_, Robert W. Sebesta
>
> I couldn't remember how to spell Zuse, so I decided to look it up an'
> spit out my findings.)
No problem, but thank you for the summary. I was thinking of Hopper's
Compiling System for UNIVAC and some of the Short Code and Speedcoding
systems out there.
> : would today call an Arithmetic-Logic Unit. It had the basic
> : architecture of a Von Neumann machine almost a century before Von
> : Neumann wrote up the famous manual. It was also fiendishly complex.
>
> Erm. Isn't that the Von Neuman architecture, and -not- the Von Neuman
> Machine? IIRC, the VNM is the self-replicating machine, unrelated to the
> VNA.
Thank you for the correction. A VNM would be the monolith from 2010.
:-)
Graham Head
In article <4ufop7$h...@mtinsc01-mgt.ops.worldnet.att.net>, David Johnson
<djohnson...@worldnet.att.net> writes
>Graham Head <Gra...@nunhead.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
>
>>Oh. I quite liked it. Let me think why...
>
>Really? I found it lacking in essentials - such as a plot and an
>ending - myself...
>
Hardly _essentials_, just nice-to-have's surely? And even then, plots &
endings aren't at all what's required in many books... quite the
opposite, in fact. The ur-postmodern play with _Sybil_ in TDE surely
suggests it isn't intended as a realist or 'classical' novel (if you see
what I mean in an SF context), nor to be read as such.
Anyway, I felt there _was a plot, just that it was purposefully obscured
uder a plethora of incipient referential detail. Rather like Gene
Wolfe, or a collection of Crowley's "Snake's hands" (not that I intend
by those comparisons that the novel is _that_ good!).
YMMV of course.
--
Graham Head
Douglas Hoff
David Johnson <djohnson...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in article
<4ufop7$h...@mtinsc01-mgt.ops.worldnet.att.net>...
> Graham Head <Gra...@nunhead.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
>
> >Oh. I quite liked it. Let me think why...
>
> Really? I found it lacking in essentials - such as a plot and an
> ending - myself...
Cyberpunk writers (esp Gibson) are noted for their obscure plotlines. I
have read the "Sprawl" trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa
Overdrive) about 4x, and have yet to figure out what it all meant.
I think Gibson and Sterling did quite a good job at creating a steamtech
early Victorian society, however.
Douglas Hoff
Loki <gwis...@uoguelph.ca> wrote in article
<4uj1su$s...@ccshst05.uoguelph.ca>...
> In ashen ink, Travers Naran (tna...@van-as-07b05.direct.ca) inscribed:
> : short stories ("Heavy Weather" is another example) and William Gibson
> : has really gone down hill since the publication of "Neuromancer".
> : After that, even his sequels to Neuromancer had little to no point to
> : justify even their pulpy existence. After reading _Count Zero_ and
> : _Mona Lisa Overdrive_, I still had no idea what I was supposed to get
> : from the book, because after God knows how many hours spent reading
> : them I just couldn't see the point of reading them.
>
> YMMV. I'm not a huge fan of _Virtual Light_, but the _Neuromancer_
> trilogy is wonderful, end-to-end, IMO.
I liked _Virtual Light_ for its characters, real people with jobs, etc.
rather than the cybercriminals of the "Sprawl" trilogy. The latter is
noted for its vision (Gibson single-handedly created the idea of the Net as
a _place_, rather than just, well, what it is: a bunch of computers linked
together with wires) and for the sheer style of his writing. The plots are
indeed obscure and the novels are without clear endings. BUT, one must
wonder if that is not superior to the bulk of AH fiction, which telegraphs
every concept, not giving the reader the opportunity to figure it out on
his/her own. For example, SM Stirling tells us that the Domination of the
Draka is the anti-America on about page 10 of _Marching Through Georgia_.
I do believe it comes in the form of the American reporter pondering how
strange the Domination is. Could not any of us have figured that out on
our own?
Paul Gorman
Travers Naran (tna...@van-as-04c16.direct.ca) wrote:
: I agree. Part of this comes out when we look at ancient
: civilizations and wonder how they did it without computers, machines,
: etc. we forget how lazy computers, machines, etc. have made us.
: Without these wonderful aids, humans had to think smarter and come up
: with some very charming, elegant systems for solving these problems.
: Even down to just having good ol' fashioned human experience and
: intelligence.
Hmmmm... sometimes those human methods are hellishly brute force
though. I remember seeing a documentary on TV showing how log tables
were constructed by some army or another. It involved getting about
100 people and sitting them in a 10 x 10 grid and feeding numbers
in each row, each 'cell' doing one calculation and results coming out
at the end. In a bizarre way a sort of organic computer. The
the calculations were smoe kind of simple arithmetic too...
Superdan
> In ashen ink, Travers Naran (tna...@van-as-07b05.direct.ca) inscribed:
> : short stories ("Heavy Weather" is another example) and William Gibson
> : has really gone down hill since the publication of "Neuromancer".
> : After that, even his sequels to Neuromancer had little to no point to
> : justify even their pulpy existence. After reading _Count Zero_ and
> : _Mona Lisa Overdrive_, I still had no idea what I was supposed to get
> : from the book, because after God knows how many hours spent reading
> : them I just couldn't see the point of reading them.
>
> YMMV. I'm not a huge fan of _Virtual Light_, but the _Neuromancer_
> trilogy is wonderful, end-to-end, IMO.
I loved _Neuromancer_ and the _Burning Chrome_ collection, but as far as
I am concerned, the rest of Gibson's work has been pointless drek. I
couldn't get through CZ or MLO the first time I tried to read them -- I
had to FORCE myself to finish. Of course, it could have been bad timing.
I tried to read _The Difference Engine_ and put it down after 20 pages.
Well, the next time I tried reading it, I got absolutely *hooked* and
couldn't put it down. Virtual Light? Bleah.
I guess my biggest complaint about cyberpunk is that it's supposed to be
a story with attitude, yet the narrative voice used always seems to be dry
and disinterested, or too "flowery" (Gibson's lyrical approach to
things). Maybe that's why I enjoyed _Snow Crash_ so much -- Stephenson's
voice in it was fast-forward, slam-dunk, in-your-face,
this-is-how-it-is-and-if-you-don't-like-
it-well-that's-too-bad. It made for a fun read, that got me hooked in the
first paragraph. Partly because it was *different* and partly because the
narrative voice left no doubts in my mind...
-- Dan
Robert Sneddon
Re : Babbage's Analytical Engine
Is there a (shareware/freeware) simulation of the Engine
out there somewhere? It would be so *appropriate*, somehow...
--
"We've got a kilo of grass, a case of Scotch and a crate full of Uzis -
"Let's go to Disneyworld !!!!!"
Robert (nojay) Sneddon
Loki
In ashen ink, Douglas Hoff (dhof...@worldnet.att.net) inscribed:
: Cyberpunk writers (esp Gibson) are noted for their obscure plotlines. I
: have read the "Sprawl" trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa
: Overdrive) about 4x, and have yet to figure out what it all meant.
: I think Gibson and Sterling did quite a good job at creating a steamtech
: early Victorian society, however.
Whereas I've liked the Sprawl trilogy immensely each time and found
_the Difference Engine_ bored me almost immediately, and disappointed
me throughout.
YMMV.
- Loki
--
+------------------+----------------------------------------------+
| Geoffrey Wiseman | http://tdg.uoguelph.ca/~ontarion/users/geoff |
+------------------+----------------------------------------------+
"Pbhyq guvf or pbafvqrerq n fhoyvzvany zrffntr?"
Loki
: rather than the cybercriminals of the "Sprawl" trilogy. The latter is
Half-and-half : part of Neuromancer is that the characters -are- somewhat
normal there. They -are- extraordinary people caught up in extra-ordinary
events, certainly, but they're relatively valid 'professions' in that kind
of a setting.
: noted for its vision (Gibson single-handedly created the idea of the Net as
: a _place_, rather than just, well, what it is: a bunch of computers linked
: together with wires) and for the sheer style of his writing. The plots are
I tend to discout that. It's an interesting concept, but it was just a
device to advance the story, for Gibson, so I can't ascribe -too- much
vision to him. His writing style, on the other hand, I do
love--particularly in _Burning Chrome_.
: indeed obscure and the novels are without clear endings. BUT, one must
I tend to enjoy obscurity, though. I like frayed ends, real lives that
don't all package up into easy-to-explain and easy-to-wrap-up pieces. I
like knowing that the end has given me much to think about without giving
me total closure. Sometimes that obscurity and confusion works against
me; there have been passages in Philip K. Dick novels where the meaning
was lost on me, sadly, but I still would rather have it that way than not.
- Loki
--
+------------------+----------------------------------------------+
| Geoffrey Wiseman | http://tdg.uoguelph.ca/~ontarion/users/geoff |
+------------------+----------------------------------------------+
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe: attack ships on fire off
the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the
Tanhauser gate. All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in
the rain. Time to die."
unkno...@earthlink.net
along the lines of this post......
"The Zuse-2, the first electromechanical computer built in 1939 by the
German engineer Konrad Zuse, would then have cost about $90,000 in
today's money and took 10 seconds to multiply two numbers. By contrast,
the sun4 workstation, introduced in 1987, cost $10,000 and can multiply
two numbers in 400 nanoseconds.
In raw power, measured by the admittedly crude yardstick of the time
required to mulitiply two numbers, the Sun-4 is 25 million times faster
than its predecessor. If we consider the cost per unit of computing
power, the comparison is even more favorable: it costs 225 million
times less to do a multiplication with the Sun-4 than with the Zuse-2.
To understand the staggering implication of thes figures, consider what
similar improvements would bring about if applied to automobiles. A
luxury car of 1938-say a Cadillac-would have cost about $30,000 in
today's money. It reached a top speed of 60 miles an hour and traveled
about 15 miles on the gallon. If today's Cadillac were to the 1938 car
what the SUn-4 is to the Zuse-2, it would cost only $3,300, run at twice
the speed of light, and do 3 billion miles per gallon!"
-From, AI The Tumultuos History of the Search for Artificial
Intellignece by Daniel Crevier. pg 296.
WWWWWWWWOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!!
-from ME Jaw Dropping as I Read, in July 1995 sitting on the front
porch.
Dave Goldman
In article <01bb880b$f37a0aa0$9a5545c7@ATTWorldnet>, "Douglas Hoff"
<dhof...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>... (Gibson single-handedly created the idea of the Net as
> a _place_, rather than just, well, what it is: a bunch of computers linked
> together with wires) ...
Try Vinge's "True Names" for an earlier example. Though Gibson does
apparently get the credit for the term "cyberspace".
-- Dave Goldman
Portland, OR
Travers Naran
Loki (gwis...@uoguelph.ca) pontificated:> : noted for its vision (Gibson single-handedly created the idea of the Net as
> : a _place_, rather than just, well, what it is: a bunch of computers linked
>
> I tend to discout that. It's an interesting concept, but it was just a
> device to advance the story, for Gibson, so I can't ascribe -too- much
> vision to him. His writing style, on the other hand, I do
> love--particularly in _Burning Chrome_.
Oh, I agree with you there. _Burning Chrome_ is the most fun I had
while reading a collection. It has fun, it has realism and it has
characters and style.
Virtual Light, IMHO, was a more concrete novel in its plot, style and
actually having an ending. But I didn't like it that much. It was
OK, but not his greatest work.
I read the Sprawl trilogy backwards from Mona Lisa Overdrive, which I
thought was kind of neat, to Count Zero, which has an interesting
idea, and finally Neuromancer. After reading _Neuromancer_, I just
could not stomach _Count Zero_ or _Mona Lisa Overdrive_ anymore. The
novels were about *nothing*. Gibson had nothing interesting to say
other than, "Gee, aren't these neat people?" No, they are not
Billy-boy. Neuromancer was a story about something. A story about
how nebulous our version of reality is, especially when we depend on
our memories to define it for us. Gibson's idea that consciousness is
just remembering what happened a second or more ago. The idea comes
up with a vengance in _Mona Lisa Overdrive_ with the former car-thief
whose punishment was he couldn't remember anything less than 5 seconds
ago.
His vision of how humanity would mutate under this nebulous reality
was the most compelling thing about _Neuromancer_.
> : indeed obscure and the novels are without clear endings. BUT, one must
>
> I tend to enjoy obscurity, though. I like frayed ends, real lives that
> don't all package up into easy-to-explain and easy-to-wrap-up pieces. I
> like knowing that the end has given me much to think about without giving
> me total closure. Sometimes that obscurity and confusion works against
> me; there have been passages in Philip K. Dick novels where the meaning
> was lost on me, sadly, but I still would rather have it that way than not.
I think people beat up on easy-to-explain-and-wrap-up stories too much
these days; they definitely can be fun to read and still good works
of literature.
But frayed-ends require talent to pull off correctly. It requires
knowing how to artistically fray the ends so that the reader tries to
understand how the strand got where it was and use their imagination
to see the other ends. I've read too many novels where the fraying
had the feeling off a launch-board for sequel rather than giving the
sense of a story with no end and no beginning. E.g., a good example
is _The Illuminatus Trilogy_ by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea.
If you, Loki, like obscurity, frayed ends, etc. I would *strongly*
recommend reading _The Illuminatus Trilogy_. Or even _Schrodinger's
Cat_ by Robert Anton Wilson, which is an independent novel with ties
to the Illuminatus Trilogy.
John D. Owen
Travers Naran wrote:
>
> Bruce Sterling novels don't seem to be anywhere near as good as his
Hmm, I might be able to make a case for most of his earlier novels not
being as good as his short stories, but I'd make an exception for Heavy
Weather. After reading that, I really felt that Sterling had at last
begun to get the hang of the novel form. Of course, then I went and read
The Difference Engine, which kind of blew that theory to hell!
JDO
Chris Williams
In article <dave-14089...@ip-pdx04-53.teleport.com>, da...@rsd.com
says...
>In article <01bb880b$f37a0aa0$9a5545c7@ATTWorldnet>, "Douglas Hoff"
><dhof...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>> a _place_, rather than just, well, what it is: a bunch of computers
>Try Vinge's "True Names" for an earlier example. Though Gibson does
>apparently get the credit for the term "cyberspace".
Does that pre-date Brunner's "Shockwave Rider" which IMO introduced most of
the cyperpunk themes in 1975?
Chris
Paul Resch
I know of 5 titles in this series. Were any more written?
Was Frankowski a pen or actual name?
Has anything else been issued by that author?
Thanks.
Paul
The Outposter
On 15 Aug 1996 05:13:22 GMT, pcr...@ix.netcom.com(Paul Resch) wrote:
:I know of 5 titles in this series. Were any more written?
:
Five is all the Cross-Time Engineer books so far.He wrot a novel called
Copernick"s Rebellion a very !! humerous book about genetic engineering.I would
recomend it if you like humerous science fiction.
The Outposter
gyou...@cyberramp.net
"911 - if you are calling to report a murder, press 1..."
Steve Gordon
In article <4uv1be$s...@bignews.shef.ac.uk>, C.A.Wi...@shef.ac.uk (Chris
Williams) wrote:
Can you suggest a good book on the history of computers? Thanks.
R. Byers
On Wed, 14 Aug 1996, John D. Owen wrote:
> Hmm, I might be able to make a case for most of his earlier novels not
> being as good as his short stories, but I'd make an exception for Heavy
> Weather. After reading that, I really felt that Sterling had at last
> begun to get the hang of the novel form. Of course, then I went and read
> The Difference Engine, which kind of blew that theory to hell!
Except that _The Difference Engine_ is an earlier novel than
_Heavy Weather_, so your theory is not contradicted.
I'm curious, however, why you prefer _Heavy Weather_ to
_Schismatrix_ or _Islands in the Net_. I actually found _HW_ a let down
compared to those two--and probably even compared to _DE_. The conflicts
in _HW_ were not dramatically compelling to me (although some of them
were intellectually interesting), whereas _Schismatrix_ and _Islands in
the Net_ are both driven by a series of interesting dramatic
confrontations/conflicts. I'll certainly agree that both those earlier
books have structural problems, but I thought _HW_ did too.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Randy Byers Reviews and stuff:
http://weber.u.washington.edu/~rbyers/
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Rick Grant
"John D. Owen" <J.D....@open.ac.uk> wrote:
>Hmm, I might be able to make a case for most of his earlier novels not
>being as good as his short stories, but I'd make an exception for Heavy
>Weather. After reading that, I really felt that Sterling had at last
>begun to get the hang of the novel form. Of course, then I went and read
>The Difference Engine, which kind of blew that theory to hell!
I agree with you, and although I try to keep in mind that reading
preference is a personal thing and to criticise an author simply
because the style doesn't agree with one's preference is unfair, I
found the Difference Engine just about unreadable. I was never going
to read anything else by him but I started reading Heavy Weather by
accident and found it quite good. There are so many parallels with
the movie Twister that I wonder whether there was any editorial
connection.
Rick Grant
rgr...@cadvision.com
Calgary, Canada
Cobra Communications
Travers Naran
Robert Sneddon (no...@ibfs.demon.co.uk) pontificated:
>
> Re : Babbage's Analytical Engine
>
> Is there a (shareware/freeware) simulation of the Engine
> out there somewhere? It would be so *appropriate*, somehow...
No. *sigh*
Part of the problem being affordable and accurate reprints of the
Analytical Engine, as well as the effort to try and find either a
reprint or an effective reprint of Ada's programming manual. That
last item alone should be enough. I would be willing to implement it
if someone can point me to where I could get it!
Dave Goldman
[> Various authors wrote:]
> >>... (Gibson single-handedly created the idea of the Net as
> >> a _place_, rather than just, well, what it is: a bunch of computers
> >> linked together with wires) ...
>
> >Try Vinge's "True Names" for an earlier example. Though Gibson does
> >apparently get the credit for the term "cyberspace".
>
> Does that pre-date Brunner's "Shockwave Rider" which IMO introduced most of
> the cyperpunk themes in 1975?
As I recall, "Shockwave Rider"'s hero's computer-human interface consisted
of punching numbers on a telephone keypad. Despite all of the good things
that it _did_ introduce, a sense of the Net as a "place" or "cyberspace"
was definitely not one of them.
Travers Naran
John D. Owen (J.D....@open.ac.uk) pontificated:
> Travers Naran wrote:
> >
> > Bruce Sterling novels don't seem to be anywhere near as good as his
> > short stories ("Heavy Weather" is another example)
>
> being as good as his short stories, but I'd make an exception for Heavy
> Weather. After reading that, I really felt that Sterling had at last
> begun to get the hang of the novel form. Of course, then I went and read
> The Difference Engine, which kind of blew that theory to hell!
How do I loathe _Heavy Weather_? Oh, let me count the ways...
1. The science is hokey; extreme speculative (almost Chris Carter
speculative) science at best.
2. The characters are all some form of social outcast working
against the Man -- I mean, the Establishment. I got the feeling that
this alone was supposed to endear me to these characters -- they
didn't. ("Everyone here hacks something")
3. The story was this long, drawn out 'Twister' style story to get to
one thing -- a somewhat disappointing conspiracy idea Sterling must
have gotten while reading a French Resistance novel.
4. The story to me is about the "gee-whiz, isn't this science and
tech neat??" The characters, their motivations and stories are almost
incidental to the plot.
5. The sense of background and world that he tries to convey at
various points seem like a washed out watercolor landscape.
On the other hand, I read "Sacred Mother Cow" (or some short-story
titled to that effect) a year or two ago. Now that was a fun story
with a strong sense of purpose, character, motivations and plot. And
its goal is to give us a glimpse into this world Sterling thought
could happen. It is also rather interesting in that it brought up the
BSV, a.k.a. Mad-Cow Disease, problem that England was facing at that
moment, but the rest of the world politely ignored.
If "Heavy Weather" is the best novel Sterling has done, I think I will
stay away from his others. As for the _Difference Engine_, oh, man,
talk about a waste of four hours of reading time... It sounded
alright in the beginning, then it just really got stupid fast. What
made it worse is that it wasn't entirely Gibson and wasn't entirely
Sterling.
The science and history I felt was also badly muffed, but that has
been debated at length already in this newsgroup under the original
subject heading.
J. David Ball
On 15 Aug 1996 05:13:22 GMT, pcr...@ix.netcom.com(Paul Resch) wrote:
>I know of 5 titles in this series. Were any more written?
>
>Was Frankowski a pen or actual name?
>
>Has anything else been issued by that author?
>
>Thanks.
>
>Paul
I've had friends tell me they think the story is finished, but I think the
author has to do another book just so the main character's friend can
become pope and make the final decision on the letters that have been going
back and forth at each level of the papal bureaucracy.
-- David Ball
Joel Benford
Travers Naran wrote:
<snip>
>How do I loathe _Heavy Weather_? Oh, let me count the ways...
>1. The science is hokey; extreme speculative (almost Chris Carter
>speculative) science at best.
Is there anything inherently wrong with being extremely speculative? Bye bye
Heinlein, Niven, Banks...
Perhaps you mean that it's badly extrapolated whereas time machines, FTL,
anti-gravity and force fields are just fantastic.
I guess if it matters to you, it matters to you.
>2. The characters are all some form of social outcast working
>against the Man -- I mean, the Establishment.
They were? Where? They seemed like a bunch of misfits working to track
storms to me. I remember one retired luddite, no more.
>I got the feeling that
>this alone was supposed to endear me to these characters -- they
>didn't.
No defiant individuality in you, then. Not even a counter-cultural romantic
streak? You're probably right, it's not for you.
>("Everyone here hacks something")
I think the book's obsession with the word 'hack' may be making the point
that whilst we have traditionally dealt with machines and objects, nowadays
we are beginning to deal with interface software and control systems.
>3. The story was this long, drawn out 'Twister' style story to get to
>one thing -- a somewhat disappointing conspiracy idea Sterling must
>have gotten while reading a French Resistance novel.
Consider the proposition that Leo Mulcahey is a hero performing a task vital
to the future of the species as a whole over the long term. Go on, think
about it. I don't care whether you agree (I don't), just think. Consider
how/whether the world (us) put him in the position where he made that
decision. There's more to it than a "conspiracy idea".
>4. The story to me is about the "gee-whiz, isn't this science and
>tech neat??" The characters, their motivations and stories are almost
>incidental to the plot.
Jerry Mulcahey's character and motivation pretty much _is_ the plot. He's
the charismatic, obsessive genius pulling the rest along in his wake. If the
others had stronger characters they wouldn't be in the storm troupe.
Alex Unger is the exception - he does pretty much what he wants and don't
take no shit from nobody except when he's incapacitated. He strings along
with Jerry's gang, aloof, to see what's gonna happen. I like Alex.
>5. The sense of background and world that he tries to convey at
>various points seem like a washed out watercolor landscape.
They're having some rainfall problems, it kind of takes the colour out of
things.
<snip>
My basic problem with the book was that he threw most of the surface story
out the window just before the end and brought in a new one, then went back
to the old one with a bit of a whimper. There was something of this in
"Islands in the Net", too.
Are you an Orson Scott Card fan, by any chance?
-- Joel
_________
But in intensity, in the flashing light of what-humans-can-know (and really what else is there?) we were glorious.
-- "The Day The Dam Broke", Kathleen Ann Goonan
Travers Naran
Joel Benford (jo...@netcomuk.co.uk) pontificated:
> Travers Naran wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> >How do I loathe _Heavy Weather_? Oh, let me count the ways...
>
> >1. The science is hokey; extreme speculative (almost Chris Carter
> >speculative) science at best.
>
> Is there anything inherently wrong with being extremely speculative? Bye bye
> Heinlein, Niven, Banks...
>
> Perhaps you mean that it's badly extrapolated whereas time machines, FTL,
> anti-gravity and force fields are just fantastic.
Yes, badly extrapolated and acting as though it was done well. He did
that in the Difference Engine as well. I can handle speculative and
fantastic, but extrapolation with ego. Grrr.
> I guess if it matters to you, it matters to you.
It does -- if you pretend to be hard sci-fi, be it. Be true to your
nature, so to speak. :-)
> >2. The characters are all some form of social outcast working
> >against the Man -- I mean, the Establishment.
>
> They were? Where? They seemed like a bunch of misfits working to track
> storms to me. I remember one retired luddite, no more.
>
> >I got the feeling that
> >this alone was supposed to endear me to these characters -- they
> >didn't.
>
> No defiant individuality in you, then. Not even a counter-cultural romantic
> streak? You're probably right, it's not for you.
No defiant individuality in me? Talk to my mother -- she's been
trying to get me (unsuccesfully) to conform for 25 years! :-)
Counter-cultural romantic streak? No, never liked the so-called
"counter-culture". Cultures defined by negatives ("We are *not* the
mainstream culture") bore and disinterest me. It would have been fun
if they were luddites or something, or even real hackers like the ones
I knew! A culture defined by positives are infintely more interesting
to me... (Hey, get that positivist label away from me!) :)
> >("Everyone here hacks something")
>
> I think the book's obsession with the word 'hack' may be making the point
> that whilst we have traditionally dealt with machines and objects, nowadays
> we are beginning to deal with interface software and control systems.
Well, it was more than that. It was Sterling's feeling that
technology now adays can only be effectively used by the dis-empowered
by hacking it. It was sort of a theme of his in "The Hacker
Crackdown".
> >3. The story was this long, drawn out 'Twister' style story to get to
> >one thing -- a somewhat disappointing conspiracy idea Sterling must
> >have gotten while reading a French Resistance novel.
>
> Consider the proposition that Leo Mulcahey is a hero performing a task vital
> to the future of the species as a whole over the long term. Go on, think
> about it. I don't care whether you agree (I don't), just think. Consider
> how/whether the world (us) put him in the position where he made that
> decision. There's more to it than a "conspiracy idea".
Um, well, I did think of it that way. It's just the idea of social
engineering by distributed cells being effective in any meaningful way
seemed like social fantasy to me and how get was put into the position
I don't entirely buy either. In many ways, the novel represented the
idea of the dis-empowered trying to get back at those who have
dis-empowered them. To me, it was the same motiviations many
terrorist cells held from about 1961 to about 1985. Around 1985,
terrorist cells found a common enemy in the Thatcher-Reagan's of the
world and the idea of social engineering sort of fell of their
agendas.
> >4. The story to me is about the "gee-whiz, isn't this science and
> >tech neat??" The characters, their motivations and stories are almost
> >incidental to the plot.
>
> Jerry Mulcahey's character and motivation pretty much _is_ the plot. He's
> the charismatic, obsessive genius pulling the rest along in his wake. If the
> others had stronger characters they wouldn't be in the storm troupe.
I believe that point was made several times. Especially by his
erstwhile girlfriend who was incidentally Alex's sister.
> Alex Unger is the exception - he does pretty much what he wants and don't
> take no shit from nobody except when he's incapacitated. He strings along
> with Jerry's gang, aloof, to see what's gonna happen. I like Alex.
Alex Unger, to me, was the only interesting character in the book. He
did things because he liked to do them. No "I'm gonna change the
world!" jingoism of Jerry and his evil brother. A guy who did what he
liked and didn't care a whole lot about self-sacrifice for motives
that were not his own. I liked him too.
> >5. The sense of background and world that he tries to convey at
> >various points seem like a washed out watercolor landscape.
>
> They're having some rainfall problems, it kind of takes the colour out of
> things.
Yes, they did. And the sand and soil storms ripped the canvas as
well.
> <snip>
>
> My basic problem with the book was that he threw most of the surface story
> out the window just before the end and brought in a new one, then went back
> to the old one with a bit of a whimper. There was something of this in
> "Islands in the Net", too.
Yes, after the abuse I felt the reader was subjected to up to that
point, it was just par for the course to have a whole new plot brought
in. The epilogue was done to show off Sterling's knowledge of things
and to make things happy for the Ungers.
> Are you an Orson Scott Card fan, by any chance?
For the most part. I liked Ender's Game and even Speaker for the
Dead. I felt it was a little ham-fisted the way he handled the
other-wise brilliant philosophical story in Speaker, but it was a
very decent pair of books. I was warned away from Xenocide by many, many
friends.
R. Byers
On Fri, 16 Aug 1996, Joel Benford wrote:
> My basic problem with the book was that he threw most of the surface story
> out the window just before the end and brought in a new one, then went back
> to the old one with a bit of a whimper. There was something of this in
> "Islands in the Net", too.
Amen--although with _Heavy Weather_ I also had the problem that
the surface story didn't interest me much. I didn't care for any of the
characters, including Alex, and felt they mostly got in the way of
material that probably would have worked better as a work of non-fiction.
The material-world things that Sterling pays attention to are almost
always intersting to me.
With _Islands in the Net_, I was frustrated with the way that at
the end of a superb exploration of every which side of a global power
struggle that avoids a horrible disaster through blind luck more than
anything else, we're left with two members of one side of the struggle
holding hands and fondly hoping that everything will be better now. As
someone once remarked to me, in the course of the novel Laura loses
everything that was valuable to her, yet she ends up pretty much unchanged
by the experience. Still, the portrayal of the different contending
forces is wonderful until the "whimper" of the ending.
Joel Benford
Travers Naran wrote:
>Joel Benford (jo...@netcomuk.co.uk) pontificated:
>> Travers Naran wrote:
<reasons why he didn't enjoy Heavy Weather, discussed in different terms
from his first post on the subject>
Ah, now I understand what you didn't like about it. As you may have guessed,
none of that bothered me too much. "Sauce for the goose" and all that.
Couple of points (snipping heavily):
>It does -- if you pretend to be hard sci-fi, be it. Be true to your
>nature, so to speak. :-)
Of course, I might argue that the cyberpunks weren't writing about the
future but using SF to discuss the present, but that's another story and not
relevant to your point.
So the question is, is Sterling claiming to be hard SF? I don't know. I
don't think "this will/won't happen" is desperately important to him, but
that's pure gut instinct and I have nothing to back it up.
>>My basic problem with the book was that he threw most of the surface story
>>out the window just before the end and brought in a new one, then went back
>>to the old one with a bit of a whimper. There was something of this in
>>"Islands in the Net", too.
>Yes, after the abuse I felt the reader was subjected to up to that
>point, it was just par for the course to have a whole new plot brought
>in. The epilogue was done to show off Sterling's knowledge of things
>and to make things happy for the Ungers.
You will be delighted to know that his new one "Holy Fire" is perfect 8-).
Actually, the surface plot does just kind of stop rather like "Snow Crash",
but all the subtexts and underlying issues come to a head beautifully. You
have to be alive to what's going on under the surface to appreciate it.
I now have this guilty suspicion gnawing away at my soul that I missed
subtleties in "Islands in the Net" and "Heavy Weather"...
I'm thinking of giving "The Difference Engine" another read because I'm sure
I only scraped that. I don't read books twice - AFAIR I've reread
"Neuromancer", "Neutron Star", "Cinnabar", "A Scanner Darkly", "Use of
Weapons", "Nova" and "The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" in the last
decade.
>> Are you an Orson Scott Card fan, by any chance?
>For the most part. I liked Ender's Game and even Speaker for the
>Dead. I felt it was a little ham-fisted the way he handled the
>other-wise brilliant philosophical story in Speaker, but it was a
>very decent pair of books. I was warned away from Xenocide by many, many
>friends.
I guess by now it will come as no surprise that I thought "Ender's Game" was
rather poor and I've never been near Card since. It takes all sorts.
Andries du Toit
"R. Byers" <rby...@u.washington.edu> wrote:
> With _Islands in the Net_, I was frustrated with the way that at
>the end of a superb exploration of every which side of a global power
>struggle that avoids a horrible disaster through blind luck more than
>anything else, we're left with two members of one side of the struggle
>holding hands and fondly hoping that everything will be better now. As
>someone once remarked to me, in the course of the novel Laura loses
>everything that was valuable to her, yet she ends up pretty much unchanged
>by the experience. Still, the portrayal of the different contending
>forces is wonderful until the "whimper" of the ending.
Well, Bruce has never been able to make an ending work.
A
_______________
"What do you Mean you're Disenchanted?
Darling, we're ALL Disenchanted."
-- James Thurber
Andries du Toit
and...@aztec.co.za
John D. Owen
R. Byers wrote:
> I'm curious, however, why you prefer _Heavy Weather_ to
> _Schismatrix_ or _Islands in the Net_. I actually found _HW_ a let down
> compared to those two--and probably even compared to _DE_. The conflicts
> in _HW_ were not dramatically compelling to me (although some of them
> were intellectually interesting), whereas _Schismatrix_ and _Islands in
> the Net_ are both driven by a series of interesting dramatic
> confrontations/conflicts. I'll certainly agree that both those earlier
> books have structural problems, but I thought _HW_ did too.
>
It's a long time since I read Schismatrix, and I don't remember now why
I disliked it at the time (enough to put it into the pile for disposal,
so it's not there to refer back to), but my problems with Islands in the
Net came simply because he seemed to lose interest in the story three
quarters through, having developed a very interesting set of characters
and ideas. Sterling 'resolves' things by dumping his main character out
of the plot and into limbo (she is held hostage in a prison cell for
months) while the rest of the story continues offstage. I wanted to SEE
how he resolved the problems he set up: instead, he chickened out and
gave us some fairly lame exposition instead. I was mad at him after
simply because the first part of the story was so good -- he'd set it up
great, then failed to carry it through.
There is a certain element of that in Heavy Weather too, as if he likes
the 'dying fall' kind of ending, of ending on a slightly pessimistic
note. It was less obtrusive, less of a problem than with Islands,
though.
JDO
C&S Alexander
Hmmm. I liked HW. Thought it was a good read but, yeah, I really like
Sterling in Short Story format ... Islands in the Net being the
exception. That to me is still his best work.
As for Babbage Engines, Michael Flynn's book land of the blind or
something (read it LONG ago) WAS EXCELLENT! The phrase "In the Kingdom
of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man Rules..." has something to do with the
title that escapes me but Flynn's name doesn't. I've been waiting for
more work by him...