[Leica] Re. Babbage Difference Engine

[Douglas Barry]

Having watched that video of the Babbage, I had to play with my maths 
grenade. Still a gorgeous piece of tactile kit.
http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/DouglasBray/Oddments/MyMathsGrenade.jpg.html
Douglas

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jim Nichols" <jhnichols at lighttube.net>
To: <lrzeitlin at aol.com>; "Leica Users Group" <lug at leica-users.org>
Sent: Tuesday, October 20, 2015 3:42 PM
Subject: Re: [Leica] Re. Babbage Difference Engine


> 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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>
>
>
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