a completely-functional Babbage Difference Engine? That’s been done and duplicated . However the much more ambitious Babbage Analytical Engine? That’s another story completely. Devised by mathematician Charles Babbage within the 1830s, the Analytical Engine can also be considered to be the primary programmable computer — or at the least the 1st notion of 1 — but Babbage’s plans for it were never finished, and the device itself (which might fill a room) was never built. That did not stop computing pioneer Ada Lovelace from designing a programming language for it, though. Now a team of researchers from the Plan 28 group inside the UK have begun work on a huge undertaking to finally bring Babbage’s invention to life — a project that’s expected to expected to take upwards of ten years and value millions of bucks. Apart from a narrative at the project by John Markoff, the hot York Times also has a helpful overview of the machine itself on the source link below.
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