A demo of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine

Charles Babbage designed one of the first computers but never lived to see it built. Here's a demo of one of the two in the world that work. This one is at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, USA, and here they fire it up (well, crank it up) and explain a bit about it. www.computerhistory.org/babbage/
The folks standing around are pioneers too. They are people who built and used the Plato system (there was a conference going about Plato, which was a social media system used in the 1970s).

[@jonathankeith524]

Just think: one man thought of every single piece of this machine. Not only is it a work of art, but it can calculate complex math problems. And it can never get them wrong. Before this, there were no computers. He had NOTHING to go off of. That's what I call a genius.

[@edbo10]

not to mention that the tools available to him at the time weren't precise enough to make what he wanted, so he made his own lmao

[@davidegaruti2582]

Well , mechanical calculators existed before this , babbage built upon those , But still , he whent from a calculator that could do addition and multiplication , To this ...

[@MikeGamerGaming]

Well don't forget this machine was only perform calculations, until Ada Lovelace introduced that calculation can be Application if you set rules known as algorithm

[@SparrowNoblePoland]

There were some computing machines, some of them as old as ancient times, but they weren't so advanced or programmable, and they didn't have a printer.

[@DataJYdocs]

Like Sikorsky, Tesla.

[@DrZenith]

What a concept for 1830! What genius to design such a machine! I take my hat off to Charles Babbage.

[@boblewis5558]

When I did Computer Science at A-Level (UK) in 1968-1970 (I passed!) part of the curriculum was on Numerical Methods including Finite Differences which is EXACTLY what this machine does. We also used a standard, desktop, hand cranked calculator to perform the additions and subtractions (very similar to what happens with this machine but involving quite a few more steps). I have seen the original in operation at the London Science Museum. This video demo was excellent & very clear.

[@machiox7617]

Wow

[@praveenchukka]

I must be the luckiest guy in the century. This is a real treat to have an opportunity to see this.

[@AGFuzzyPancake]

How interesting. I did not know seeing a KZbin video about an old calculator could possibly make somebody feel like the luckiest guy of the century.

[@cybermuff]

AGFuzzyPancake Think of the money he saved viewing it on KZbin vrs seeing it in actual operation in London and Mountain view Ca. I'm sure you have been to both locations to view it by your reply.

[@AGFuzzyPancake]

I think you and I can agree that viewing a *public* video on KZbin about a mechanical calculator does not make one "lucky" by any definition.

[@daddysgirl6263]

wait till you see porn, dude

[@joesmith4546]

AGFuzzyPancake Except perhaps by the definition of lucky meaning that the sequence of possibilities led this person to a beneficial or pleasurable result. In this case, that would be a video which he had an overwhelmingly small chance to come across, but thoroughly enjoyed. Sounds lucky to me, but what do I know?

[@jimm3370]

Thank you for posting this. I've been aware of the Babbage Engine for 30 years, but could never understand its function nor purpose. Brilliant presentation.

[@sqweebel1]

Imagine what this man could have done if he lived 100 years later. Amazing.

[@yusufjiruwala]

may be lost in social media like tiktok facebook and twitter,

[@martin_eden.]

@@yusufjiruwalalol yes

[@collisw8302]

@@yusufjiruwala they had TikTok, Facebook and Twitter in 1930?

[@Gingnose]

​@@collisw8302lol

[@buck_maize111]

Industrial age machines were beautiful.. steam engines were stunning to look at and watch run..everything made was built to last and look as beautiful as possible.. I wish Babbage and ava got to see their idea in action.. it's a masterpiece 💯

[@ventor11225]

How in the absolute fuck did one man imagine that entire thing, with basically nothing to go off of!?

[@jonathanreed5360]

In discrete pieces, my friend. Solving one problem mechanically creates more problems to solve ahead of it, and then sometimes the design of something ahead requires that things behind need a revision leading to redesigns throughout.

[@typingcat]

He would have been very happy if he were alive today to see descendants of his machine are inside hands of almost everyone in the world.

[@austinfernando8406]

+Jeong-hun Sin Ada Lovelace would've been happy too (happier?) because she saw that computers can be used for things other than maths and Babbage only saw it as a mathematical tool

[@austinfernando8406]

i didn't say she would have, but she realised the engine could do more than mathematical tables, and he never did. this is more her future (where computers are mostly used for things other than purely mathematical things) than his future (where computers are only used for mathematical tables).

[@TnseWlms]

But at least when you crank out a mathematical table, it does not contain paid advertisements based on your recorded previous uses of the difference engine.

[@Etchzorz]

lol

[@jcbbb]

They're actually quite different.. It's a decimal machine not a binary electronic computer but some terminology and ideas like memory remain the same

[@DihelsonMendonca]

Julie is the clock´s machine. She provides manual clock speed to the CPU.

[@itisimatadvc]

Correct and the clock speed is 1/8 of a Htz 😄👍

[@rapidkiss]

@@itisimatadvc And the CPU is overclocked!

[@ishulove001]

imagine a water cooler for overheating

[@lordhefman]

@@rapidkiss that entirely depends on how much caffeine you give Julie.

[@TheRojo387]

Doubt she's even born in July.

[@brushfuse]

Pity the audience didn't give them some applause. Really fascinating history of Babbage and the difference engine.

[@JohanSellus]

wow, not just a machine put a piece of art. Cool to see the process of discretization visualized at 15:38 really beautiful and the essence of computing.

[@greggi47]

It is also significant as an embodiment of the degree of skill and applied effort possible in the early nineteenth century Industrial Revolution. The Engine thus serves as an aesthetic and engineering artifact.of great importance,

[@aafootballtipstv4474]

It took Babbage 37 years to complete this machine, impressive.

[@c.m.8158]

Starfield brought me here and boy is this incredible! I had never heard of this AMAZING invention! Kudos to Mr. Babbage!

[@boblewis5558]

That is NOT the purpose of the Difference Engine. Its purpose (as was explained in the video) is to produce large tables of results for complex 5th order polynomials and NOT to act as a modern scientific general purpose calculator. THAT work would have been more the purview of the Analytical Engine which would have still required some programming albeit the plan as evinced by Ada Lovelace (also stated in the video) would have been to hold such programs on punched cards.

[@jinatyumnam8362]

True

[@TheDrunkenMug]

Wow, what a nice design. Pipelining the execution and everything, he tought of allot of things back then which werent even invisioned yet. A bright man. Nice demo too, thanks for uploading !

[@AlexBlack-xz8hp]

Fantastic demo! So crazy that he envisioned that whole thing.

[@timely383]

Thank you for sharing. So helpful. I have been looking for a good explanation for days, this is the best one.

[@bilallone2829]

Have read about differential engine and analytical engine during first year of engineering and had seen them in pics only. While watching this video seeing these engines working I feel fascinated and the moment is really mesmerising with feel of gratitude for the Charles Babbage whose genius always inspired me. Earth has been made beautiful by great souls.

[@youpeoplearenuts2]

but can it run Crisis 3?

[@youpeoplearenuts2]

nigga plz

[@SigSelect]

you'll just have to spend a little time pre-rendering it

[@XerrolAvengerII]

Doesn't have a GPU with dedicated Vram so probably not.

[@laurenceperkins7468]

No. It's not turing complete. It basically just does addition. (although it does quite a lot of it all at once.)

[@juniorfio1196]

Yes, but it runs at 1 frame every 5 years.

[@maxanderson9187]

An EMP won't take that out...

[@Ali107]

But we can through a wrench inside and get the machine jammed stuck.

[@Max_Le_Groom]

@Rotten Brainz Damn fucking straight

[@digiduke2979]

Use a Faraday cage for your electronics.

[@khusbusharma3843]

𝙂𝙤𝙤𝙙

[@wastelesslearning1245]

Jam a rench through a modern circuit bored; if anything the modern is more fragile to tench interference.

[@paguerra]

Thank you for the video. I've been to the museum but was unable to see a demonstration of the machine.

[@georgeash4008]

An excellent presentation about the remarkable Charles Babbage.

[@ObiWanBillKenobi]

Thank you so much for this video! It's one of my dreams to visit the Computer History Museum!

[@jungoogie]

That is a beautiful machine! To get the parts custom crafted must have been a hell of a project. Almost makes me want to attempt to 3d print this haha.

[@carmatic]

17:24 its amazing that one of the cornerstones of modern computing exists in this thing - energy management

[@donaldjuan1729]

I know what you mean, but in one way or another, to one degree or another, energy management is important to basically everything.

[@TrevorNunes]

Great presentation thanks for this. It was a great summary of the man and machine to make us investigate further.

[@genekoveski9035]

A great description. One of the best on youtube.

[@chrislea8239]

Holy crap what a piece of equipment. From a machinist point of view this stuff was machined on basic equipment. My hats off to them, excellent tradesmen.

[@sakumar]

They were not able to build it in the 19th century for this reason. By the time this project started (1990s), they most certainly used CNC machining to fabricate the parts.

[@davidcaudill644]

This absolutely magnificent, thank you!

[@uniqnefreak]

Julie do the thing

[@DailyMotionBetter]

CaptainLeviathan very mst3k of you!😆

[@alpani6805]

Here Zhu Li was Ada Lovelace!

[@retricsu6961]

what a great demo! the host and Julie is awesome!

[@boblewis5558]

If you don't understand (or want to) engineering and maths then just blithely drive your car, cross bridges, ascend office buildings, navigate oceans and fly the skies without even thinking about the fundamentals involved. ALL those things are dependent on the type of equations that this machine can solve. Those solutions saved engineers tens of thousands of hours of otherwise tedious (error-prone) calculations & without which men would never have landed on & returned safely from the the moon!

[@ianchristie3995]

That machine is unimaginably beautiful!

[@omaryahia]

great , thank you for uploading the video

[@kasibkhan2916]

What a beautiful observation by charles babbage

[@RogerKknulll]

Fascinating! Thanks for posting! 😊

[@felixgeorge1]

thank you ... A treat to see this.

[@luciochiappetta4783]

Obrigado Charles Babbage por nos deixar essa relíquia para a evolução da humanidade.

[@DonnaBarrHerself]

Babbage and Lovelace - what a team.

[@laurenceperkins7468]

Looks to me like there's space in the printing mechanism for one of the carbon paper ribbons that they used in 1980s "mess-free" mechanical printers. That would let them demonstrate the printing without dirtying up their machine.

[@wilkinson8707]

I just today saw the real diffrence engine 1 at the science museum in London. They have version of number 2 like this which was built by the science museum.

[@jvolstad]

So where do I input my COBOL program?

[@krishmav]

It is hard to understand his creations more than two centuries later. Makes me wonder if the difference between me and him though we're both humans, is almost at the species level. This guy was something else. Damn!

[@x0rZ15t]

What an amazing piece of mechanical ingenuity!

[@user-vp9zw8is3o]

when u think much, more, much, than gutenberg`s machine. WOW

[@CSstudent_1001]

Wow I really want to see it someday

[@eddydecolombia]

Thank you Mr Scoble. Hope to see you back on TWIT someday.

[@cadenschmidt6877]

wow. what a beautiful machine, or computer! it’s a truly amazing piece of machinery

[@michaelmartin8337]

All well and good but where do you input the parameters?

[@boblewis5558]

The "input" was explained in the video but not demonstrated. Initial differences are calculated MANUALLY, as per the table on the chalk board, & MANUALLY loaded onto the columns FIRST. Then when the crank is turned it will automatically produce a complete table of results from those few manual calculations. The EXACT same mathematical process can be & has been used in modern electronic computers to produce the same type of tables. Today, the polynomial extents can of course be MUCH larger.

[@danielcampillay5641]

Bob Lewis bob i have a question bout this machine can you help me?

[@jaybs1962]

What kind of gear yardage do they have ?

[@joeybuddy96]

Great presentation!

[@eljesus788]

forget gigahertz the future resides in JulieHertz.

[@Gabriel-he6ih]

Good one, hehe :D

[@TnseWlms]

Babbage created the class definition of the difference engine. But he defined an abstract class, which could not be instantiated until someone overrode his class definition with a subclass containing methods for creating precise mechanical parts. The class also had to be instantiated on a platform that could execute the constructor function without throwing an InsufficientFunding exception.

[@rich1051414]

I see what you did there. Because he hardly ever completed anything but templates and schematics, and eventually lost his funding because of it :)

[@ffggddss]

This wins the Object-Oriented Comment award for 2017! Fred

[@TheAnxiousOwl]

Now imagine this being the lock for an entire vault with there being over 50 thousand possible combinations due to the many algorithmic components with only 10 numerals on each... Since 0 exists it can lead to many more combinations as it is added and constantly used for more numerals beyond 10.

[@peterwestberg9894]

What an amazing thing his idea was turned into.

[@rapoorvikram3813]

How do I put a graphic card in it

[@elapplzsl]

Incredible thanks for sharing!

[@wowingfacts]

I'd love to be a part of a team or build one myself, could picture the design in object orientation plus lots of mechanics and machining.

[@thegreencascade]

The machine would likely have to run faster than the speed of light to accomplish this. If the handle on the crank moves 1/10th of a meter every rotation at 3.8 GHz, the outer part of the handle would be traveling (.1 X 3,800,000,000 meters) or 380,000,000 meters per second. The speed of light is 299 792 458 m/s.

[@Hrothgar98]

At 5:00 - "...this is chutzpah..." Love it. "Chutzpah" is Yiddish for "bold", "brash", or "ballsy" (i'm american irish-english, btw... pagnostic / recovering ex-catholic)

[@VicBerger]

vaping at 2:30?

[@acmefixer1]

They said base 10 because base 2 would have taken much taller columns. I wonder what would happen if it had been designed with Base 16? Of course there would then have to be a base to base conversion unit.

[@RRC888]

The dude was clearly well ahead of his time. If the government back then supported him, the Victorian era could have had its own steam-powered information age lol. Now we have extremely advanced computing devices that fit on the palm of our hands. And all most people use it for is to take selfies and show what they had for breakfast or lunch to the world lol.

[@jbutcher1983]

I saw this in person, and it is impressive. Being a mechanic, I would hate to have to maintain it. :) Needs lots of oiling apparently.

[@trentonjennings9105]

Reflection below it in what appears to be a tray may indicate an oil catch pan.

[@diegoapto701]

I am form brazil, very good images...I love history of computers.

[@keithbiz85]

15:30 to see it in action

[@ishtiaqueahmed3623]

Real genius. Respect to babage and lovelace

[@connormclernon26]

The way I look at this is that the application wouldn’t have been science but ballistics. These would be used as fire control computers to calculate the fall of shot

[@jaysonpascual2685]

imagine building that big machine like wtf bro, pretty impresive

[@codingexpert412]

Charles Babage Not Only Father of Computers A God Of Computors creating The Difference engine He Is a pure genius

[@Newbie_Explorer]

he has given amazing idea to the world

[@gecko5873]

could you run malware on Babbage's machine?

[@RafiqulIslam-uu7bm]

Simply Amazing!

[@AmericanSpartan]

I can just imagine how pissed off Charles Babbage had to be while explaining this at his Saturday Night parties while the guest just wanted to watch his dancing toy robot

[@thankyouthankyou1172]

sorry, where's the punch card? can somebody help?

[@Naseem_Alsabah]

شكراً لكم. Thank they.

[@currentbrock5457]

Here in 2024 still want to build an app I feel like learning the basics is necessary

[@laxmangurung9542]

Amazing Machine!

[@chatsociety]

Amazing to see difference engines at work.

[@sanaljith8860]

Anyone during 2023¿

[@user-xq5iv9bn3s]

Yes I am

[@rohitsonawale16]

2024

[@oz969]

Jaw dropping! Talk about ahead of your time

[@manjeet2698]

What if the answer is a complex number? I mean in the form of iota

[@theharshkhar3]

Dude , That proved to be Informative,in my search for the "History of Computers" ;)

[@Oldtimerider]

Anything called an “engine” is fine by me. What an incredible device!

[@ilikepienotu]

So were dose the input go in

[@ffggddss]

In the form of starting values, they get set on all the number columns from right to left, except the leftmost column, which gets the calculated results as the machine operates. Fred

[@garyharrison4915]

Can it play Crysis?

[@bmwbru]

Great video! Thanks for sharing!

[@tincho15neem]

Amazing answer.

[@ninjapirate123]

Thanks for inventing computers

[@ufoengines]

I ran across this old patent 3190554 where the logic gates run on compressed air instead of electricity. Was this computer ever built and used for something? Could such a computer be built today using a 3D printer? If Babbage had gone the compressed air approach could he have gained the help of London's organ grinders in the building of his difference engine? I read that Babbage and the organ grinders were bitter enemies.

[@RobertSzasz]

Some air driven logic was used in machinery IIRC

[@ufoengines]

What's IIRC ? sounds cool. I was thinking that some tech high school kids can get together and make one as a 3D project and of course You Tube it so slobs like me can get a peek at this old tech running. New tech making old tech for teaching the young. Neat!

[@RobertSzasz]

If I remember correctly.. I seem to remember some air driven sequencing and interlocks. A hydraulic logic system might be doable, but air is way too compressible for more than a small handful of logic elements.

[@ltva8781]

I can remember only one Russian video about old Soviet toy constructor which really is just a bunch of compressed air powered logic elements. Search by the name "Пневмоника и процессор постапокалипсиса"

[@18plusful63]

4:09 He had aspbergers?

[@pfever]

Is he Chris Bishop?

[@thetruereality2]

I think Mr Babbage would fit right into this era.

[@ihsanauliarahman1057]

Imagine if Babbage knew about binary number. He might have simplified the engine and completed the analytical engine.

[@juanpablogonzaleztrejos3266]

it's amazing!!!

[@michael_toms]

Who on earth would made the Antikythera Mechanism? They seem to be similar devices mechanically.

[@alexanderstiefelmann5982]

That one was apparently (from the parts that survived the time in water) used to calculated astronimocal events, mainly lunar and solar eclipses. Quite a different purpose.

[@jakobole]

Imagine, being able to imagine such a machine....

[@camilocuervo6046]

The guy is my neighbour he is buried in kensal rise cemetery, I'm moored next to it that's why lots of people come to visit him 👍👍

[@mikethornet7842]

What a beauty