Myhrvold & Swade Discuss Babbage's Difference Engine

[@eahannan]

Excellent lecture

[@schulzmj1]

Amazing work of art.

[@AHsanantonio]

What an incredible point.

[@ufoengines]

I ran across this old digital computer patent 3190554 where it ran on compressed air instead of electricity. Was one ever built and used for anything? Could one be built today using 3D printing? If Babbage had gone the route could he have had is Difference Engine built by the folks who made pipe organs?

[@Satchmoeddie]

+ufoengines Possibly, but very unlikely. Electro-pneumatic & pneumo-electric controls have been used for some time, but not so much in Victorian times. The modern concert piano forte was still rather new at this time. Makers of theater organs, and or player pianos would be a slightly more likely candidate. There were also flute clocks, player violins, and various combinations there of, usually always mixed with player pianos. There are numerous patents for pneumatic computers. In the 1930 through the mid 1960s several pneumatic computer patents were filed. With the advent of more reliable transistors, pneumatic computers were pretty much usurped along with mercury tank, spring delay lines, magnetic core memory, and the pneumatic, compressed air/vacuum engines were relegated to curious historical footnotes. In early the 1960s it was said, a pneumatic computer could do anything, equally as well or better than an electronic computer could. Enter transistors, and that concept went away. Bucket brigade transistor capacitor stages replaced magnets, springs, wires, and tanks of mercury as delay lines.

[@ufoengines]

Seems folks who live numbers have always seen the need for computation buy machine. Or something like that. Have and opinions on Collision Based Computing? Was thinking Brush Bots would be handy/fun in this idea.