Researchers begin attempt to recreate 180-year-old computer design

Charles Babbage is widely considered to be one of the fathers of computing. In the 1800s, he conceived of several designs for mechanical devices that were strikingly similar in basic architecture to the modern computer. A fellow scientist, Ada Lovelace, recognized that Babbage's designs could be used for much more than the tabulating and calculating Babbage envisioned. The question posed by modern computer historians, however, is whether or not the machines would have actually worked. Now researchers in Britain are embarking on a project to determine just that.

Generally, when we get excited about a ten-year, multimillion dollar research project involving computers, it's something faster, smaller, or otherwise more impressive. This team, however, will be attempting to create Babbage's Analytical Engine — a primitive, room-sized mechanical device using gears and punch cards to perform mathematical calculations.

Led by programmer John Graham-Cumming and Doron Swade, a former curator at Science Museum in London, the team has digitized Babbage's blueprints in preparation for crowd-sourcing the analysis of what exactly they should build. Unlike the Difference Engine, for which Babbage produced a complete set of plans (and which has already been successfully recreated by modern researchers), the Analytical Engine design was never actually finished. Babbage tinkered with it for decades, and it was a continual work in progress. The photograph above shows a trial model Babbage built of part of the Analytical Engine, currently on display at the Science Museum.

The team's research will hopefully answer the question of whether or not, given adequate time and resources, Babbage's Analytical Engine would have worked. The three-step process will first determine which design to use, then build a three-dimensional computer-simulation, and finally build the actual machine.

[Image credit: Bruno Barral (ByB)/Wikimedia Commons]

[via New York Times]

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