but Racine I'm going to talk to you
about is what I call the greatest
machine that never was it was a machine
that was never built and yet it will be
built it was a machine that was designed
long before anyone thought about
computers if you know anything about the
history of computers you will know that
in the 30s and the 40s simple computers
were created that started the computer
revolution we have today and you would
be correct except you'd have the wrong
century
the first computer was really designed
in the 1830s and 1840s not the 1930s and
1940s it was designed and parts of it
were prototyped and the bits of it that
were built are here in south kensington
their machine was built by this guy
Charles Babbage now I have a great
affinity of Charles Babbage because his
hair is always completely unkempt like
this in every single picture and he was
a very wealthy man and a sort of part of
the aristocracy of Britain and on a
Saturday night in Marylebone were you
part of the intelligentsia at that
period you would have been invited round
to his house for a soiree and he invited
everybody kings the Duke of Wellington
many many famous people and he would
have shown you one of his mechanical
machines
I really missed that area you know we
could go around for a soiree and see a
mechanical computer get demonstrated to
you but Babbage Babbage himself was born
at the end of the 18th century and was a
fairly famous mathematician he held the
post that Newton held at Cambridge and
that was recently held by Stephen
Hawking he's less well known than either
of them because he got this idea to make
mechanical computing devices and never
made any of them and the reason he never
made any of them he's a classic nerd
every time he had a good idea he thinks
brilliant I'm going to start building
that one I'll spend a fortune on it I've
got a better idea I'm going to work on
this one and let me do this one he did
this until Sir Robert Peel then Prime
Minister basically kicked him out of
number 10 Downing Street and kicking him
out in those days that meant saying I
bid you good day sir
um the thing he designed was this
monstrosity here the analytical engine
now just to give you an idea this is
this is a view from above every one of
these circles is a car
a stack of cogs and this thing is as big
as a steam locomotive so as I go through
this talk I want you to imagine this
gigantic machine we heard there's
wonderful sounds of what this thing does
sound like and I'm going to take you
through the architectures machine that's
why it's computer architecture and tell
you about this this machine which is a
computer so let's talk about the memory
the memory is very like a memory of a
computer today except it was all a made
out of metal stacks and stacks of cogs
30 cogs hi imagine a thing this high of
cogs hundreds and hundreds of them and
they've got numbers on them it's a
decimal machine everything's done in
decimal he thought about using binary
the prom with using binary the machine
would have been so tall it would've been
ridiculous as it is it's enormous so
he's got memory the memory is this bit
over here you see it all like this this
monstrosity over here is the CPU the
chip if you like of course it's this big
completely mechanical this whole machine
is mechanical this is a picture of a
prototype for part of the CPU which is
in the Science Museum the CPU could do
the four fundamental functions of
arithmetic so addition multiplication
subtraction division which already is a
bit of a feat in metal but it could also
do something that a computer does in a
calculator doesn't this machine could
look at its own internal memory and make
a decision it could do the if-then for
basic programmers and that fundamentally
made it into a computer it could compute
it couldn't just calculate it could do
more now if we look at this and we stop
for a minute and we think about chips
today we can't look inside a silicon
chip it's just so tiny yet if you did
you would see something very very
similar to this there's this incredible
complexity in the CPU and this
incredible regularity in the memory if
you ever seen an electron microscope
picture you'll see this it all looks the
same and there's a bit over here which
isn't got to be complicated this all
this cogwheel mechanism here is doing
what the computer does but of course you
need to program this thing and of course
Babbage used the technology of the day
and a technology it would reappear in
the 50s 60s and 70s which is punch cards
this thing over here is one of three
punch card readers in here and this is a
program in the Science Museum just not
far from here
created by Charles Babbage that is
sitting there you can go see it waiting
for the machine to be built and there's
not just one of these as many of them he
prepared programs anticipating this
would happen now the reason we use punch
cards was that jacquard in France had
created the jacquard loom which was
weaving these incredible patterns
controlled by punch cards so he was just
repurposing the technology of the day
and like everything else he did he's
using the technology of his era
so 1830s 1840s 1850s cogs steam
mechanical devices ironically ball in
the same year as Charles Babbage was
Michael Faraday who had completely
revolutionary ruthless never died
everything with the Dynamo transform was
always was things
Babbage of course wanted to use proven
technology so steam and things now he
needs accessories obviously you got a
computer now you've got punch cards a
CPU and memory you need accessories
you're going to come with you're not
going to have that so first of all he
had sound he had a bell so if anything
went wrong or the machine needed the
attendant to come to it there was a bell
it could ring and there's actually
instruction on the punch card that says
ring the bell so you know madness ding
you know just stopped Ramone imagine all
those noise this thing's like the steam
engine ding right and you also need a
printer obviously everyone is a printer
this is actually a picture of the
printing mechanism for another machine
of his called The Difference Engine
number 2 which he never built but which
the science museum did build in the 80s
and 90s it's a completely mechanical
again a printer and it prints just
numbers because he was obsessed with
numbers and but it does print onto paper
and even does word wrapping so to get to
underline it goes round like that and
you also need graphics right I mean if
you going to do anything with graphics
so he said well I need a plotter I got a
big piece of paper an ink pen and I'll
make it plot so he designed a plotter as
well and and you know at that point I
think he got pretty much pretty good
machine and along comes this woman Ada
Lovelace now imagine these soirees all
these great and good comes along this
lady is the daughter of mad
and dangerous to know Lord Byron and her
mother being a bit worried that she
might have inherited some of Lord
Byron's madness and badness thought I
know the solution mathematics is the
solution we'll teach her mathematics
that'll calm her down because of course
there's never been a mathematician
that's gone crazy so in an army file
suddenly refi so she's got this
mathematical and training and she goes
to one of these soirees with her mother
and Charles Babbage you know gets out
his machine so Duke of Wellington is
there you know again that machine
obviously demonstrated and she gets it
she's the only person in his lifetime
really who said I understand what this
does and I understand the future of this
machine and we owe to her an enormous
amount because we know a lot about the
machine that Babbage was intending to
build because of her now some people
call her the first programmer this is
actually the from one of the paper that
she translated this is a program written
in a particular style it's not a
historically totally accurate that she's
the first programmer and actually she
did something more amazing rather than
just being a programmer she saw
something that Babbage didn't Babbage
was totally obsessed with mathematics he
was building a machine to do mathematics
and Lovelace said you could do more than
mathematics on this machine and just as
you do everyone in this room has ready
got a computer on them right now because
I got a phone if you go into that phone
every single thing in out phone or
computer or anything any other computing
device is mathematics it's all numbers
at the bottom whether it's video or text
or music or voice it's all numbers is
all underlying it mathematical functions
happening and Lovelace said just because
you're doing mathematical functions and
symbols doesn't mean this thing's can't
represent other things in the real world
such as music this was the huge leap
because Babbage is there saying we get
to complete these amazing functions and
print out tables and numbers and draw
graphs and Lovelace of those he says
look this thing could even compose music
if you told it a representation of music
numerically so this is what I call
Lovelace asleep when you say she's a
programmer
she did do some but the real thing is to
have said the future is going to be much
much more than this now 100 years later
this guy comes Long Island cheering and
and in 1936 and invents the computer all
over again
now of course Babbage's machine was
entirely mechanical cheering's machine
was entirely theoretical both of these
guys were coming from a mathematical
perspective but cheering told us
something very important he just laid
down the mathematical foundations for
computer science and said it doesn't
matter how you make a computer it
doesn't matter if your computer's
mechanical like Babbage's was or
electronic like computers are today or
perhaps in the future cells or again
mechanical again once we get into
nanotechnology we could go back to
Babbage's machine and just make it tiny
all those things are computers there
isn't a computing essence this is called
the church during thesis and so suddenly
you get this link where you say this
thing Babbage built really was a
computer in fact it was capable of doing
everything we do today with computers
only really slowly to give you an idea
of how slowly we had about 1k of memory
and it used punch cards which have been
fed in and it ran about 10,000 times
slower than the first zx81 it did have a
ram pack you could add on a lot of extra
memory if you wanted to so where does
that bring us today so there's there's a
there aplan over in Swindon the science
museum archive there are hundreds of
plans and thousands of pages of notes
written by Charles Babbage about this
analytical engine one of those is a set
of plans that we call plan 28 and that
is also the name of a charity that I
started with Doron Swade
who was the curator of computing at the
Science Museum and also the person who
drove the project to build difference
engine and our plan is to build it here
in South Kensington we will build the
analytical engine the project has a
number of parts to it one was the
scanning of Babbage's archive that's
been done the second is now the study of
all of those plans to determine what to
build the third part is a computer
simulation of that machine and the last
part is to physically build it at the
science
when it's built you'll finally be able
to understand how a computer works
because we're having a tiny chip in
front of you you better look at this
humongous thing and say ah I see the
memory operating I see the CPU are
breaking I hear it operating I probably
smell it operating and but in between
that we're going to do a simulation
Babbage himself wrote that he said as
soon as the analytical engine exists it
will surely guide the future course of
science because he never built it
because he was always fiddling with new
plans but when he did get built of
course in the 1940s everything changed
I'll just give you a little taste of
what it looks like in motion with a
video which shows just one part of the
CPU mechanism working so there's just
three sets of cogs and it's going to add
this is the adding mechanism in action
so you imagine this gigantic machine so
give me five years before the 2030s
happen we'll have it thank you very much