[Leica] Re. Babbage Difference Engine

[Jim Nichols]

Larry,

You really know how to bring back the memories.  My first encounter with 
a calculating machine was as an undergraduate in the late 1940s, and I 
suspect it was a Freiden, but can't recall for sure. What I do recall is 
that one had to flip the carriage from column to column by hand.

By 1953, when I was working in my first real engineering job, I had my 
choice of either an automatic Freiden or a Marchant.  I chose the 
Marchant, and used it to calculate supersonic nozzle contours and solve 
stress equations.  The real marvel of the day was the Square Root 
Freiden.  My wife used a Freiden that was connected to print its output 
on an IBM Selectric, but it was a maintenance nightmare, and seldom 
worked correctly.

Our wind tunnel data reduction was done by an ERA 1102, and printed on 
Flexowriters.

When I finally got to use the pocket calculators by TI and HP, I was 
truly amazed at what such little gadgets could do.

Jim Nichols
Tullahoma, TN USA

On 10/20/2015 9:25 AM, Larry Zeitlin via LUG wrote:
>   Herbert Kramer’s photos of the Babbage Difference Engine are revealing. To modern computer nerds it is the Holy Grail of technology, often discussed but never seen. As a young college student I used to walk by a building on campus that emitted sounds like a threshing machine. One day I wandered in and found that it was the home of the Aiken Mark 1 computer, a 30 foot long electro mechanical device that was like a Frieden Calculating machine on steroids. The noise was the sound of thousands of relays opening and closing. It took 3 seconds to add a pair of numbers, about 16 seconds to divide them. Dr. Aiken started work on it before WW2 to crank out data for the military. I was shown around the lab by An Wang, a graduate student, who later invented the core memory and founded Wang computing.The Babbge Enngine looks like the guts of an old Freiden Calculator instead of a combination of a Hammond organ and a telephone switchboard. Neither looks like my iPhone at all.
> Larry Z
>
>
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