The Babbage Engine Exhibit opens May 10 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. The central artifact of the exhibit, a faithful construction of Englishman Charles Babbage's Difference ...

IIIF provides researchers rich metadata and media viewing options for comparison of works across cultural heritage collections. Visit the IIIF page to learn more. This is a replica of the portion of a ...

This article was taken from the May 2011 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by ...

Can you say "Yowza!" when discussing Victorian England? Let's hope so, because Sydney Padua's new book is definitely "Yowza!" material. Considering that its subject is math — math and the history of ...

Gear = description Babbage spent years making and revising his plans, but only a small piece of the engine was ever built during his lifetime. The British government funded his early work, hoping that ...

As you might expect from its name, the "Difference Engine" is a strangely difficult object to describe. You might start by imagining the side of a large crib with uprights ringed by small metal wheels ...

Although you now have immense amounts of high-precision numeric-computing power at your finger tips, such power and ease are recent developments. In the book The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and ...

Charles Babbage 17911871 computer pioneer designed the first automatic computing engines He invented computers but failed to build them The first complete Babbage Engine was completed in London in ...

For many of us, the computer is the symbol of our hypermodernity, the image of how vastly we differ--culturally, economically, socially and politically--from past generations. And many of us think of ...

To most people, the phrase “electronic computer” conjures up a baffling maze of wires, transistors, magnetic tapes, punch cards, and the like, which can somehow or other be used to solve problems of ...