Читать книгу A Computer Called LEO: Lyons Tea Shops and the world’s first office computer - Georgina Ferry - Страница 10
ОглавлениеIt was predictable that Simmons and his colleagues should look to the United States for advances in technology, including computers. Its vast markets, coupled with a native enthusiasm for innovation, provided a fertile breeding ground for ideas and their commercial development. They did not know at that stage that the history of computing also owed much to British pioneers.
Charles Babbage (1792–1871), a showman as much as a thinker, had been in the forefront of the enthusiasm for scientific discovery and technological invention that ignited elements of London society in the first few decades of the nineteenth century. Although he had held the post of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge for a number of years, he had spent very little time there. He was interested in everything, but his greatest concern was to subject the problems of society to scientific and preferably numerical analysis. He developed a passionate interest in factory management, and the studies he carried out predated by almost a century the ‘time and motion’ craze of the 1920s and 1930s. For example, in his 1832 book On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures he published figures on the numbers of men, women and children needed to make pins, the time taken for each part of the process and the cost of each pin, taking into account labour and materials.
Writing of his search for laws and principles governing factory work, he commented: ‘Having been inclined during the last ten years to visit a considerable number of workshops and factories, both in England and on the Continent, for the purpose of making myself acquainted with the various resources of the mechanical art, I was insensibly led to apply to them those principles of generalisation to which my other pursuits had naturally given rise.’ From his observations he developed a poor opinion of the ability of the human species to undertake any repetitive work reliably. ‘One of the great advantages which we may derive from machinery,’ he said, ‘is from the check which it affords against the inattention of, the idleness or the dishonesty of human agents.’
The Industrial Revolution was in full swing. Machines spun and wove in factories at speeds unmatched by traditional cottage industry. Babbage the mathematician began to wonder if a machine could be made to do calculations. The best approach, he soon realised, was to reduce the calculation to a series of simpler stages, so that all the machine had to do was add and subtract. He owed this insight to the French mathematician Gaspard Riche de Prony, who had been charged with finding a feasible way to calculate all the new mathematical tables that would be needed following the introduction of the metric system by the French revolutionary government. De Prony’s solution was to organise a hierarchy of mathematical workers, beginning with a few professional mathematicians at the top and ending with a large team, who could add and subtract according to a formula worked out by those higher up the ladder. (The lowest tier was composed of redundant hairdressers, whose former customers had either lost their hair along with their heads, or prudently adopted a style of suitably radical simplicity.)
Babbage was convinced that anything a roomful of hairdressers could do, a machine could do better. He drew up designs for what he called his Difference Engine, and eventually persuaded the government to part with funds for its development. He got as far as producing a demonstration model that he displayed to wondering visitors in his London drawing room. It consisted of dozens of interconnected brass cogs with complex gears between them, which would perform predetermined (and apparently ‘miraculous’) procedures as he cranked a handle. The money ran out before he could produce a full-scale version. His design was vindicated when in 1991 curators at the Science Museum in London used his notes and drawings to produce his improved Difference Engine No. 2. Doron Swade, who led the project, tells the whole story in his book The Cogwheel Brain.
Money was not the only problem. Babbage had sidetracked himself by thinking up an even better machine: the Analytical Engine. Rather than setting up a calculation by positioning various cogs by hand, Babbage proposed to feed the Analytical Engine both program and data on punched cards such as those the French inventor Joseph Marie Jacquard had developed to automate the weaving of damask patterns into cloth. The machine never progressed beyond the design stage (although the design notes filled thirty volumes). But it encompassed much of the thinking behind the design of modern electronic computers: it had inputs, in the form of punched cards, a store or memory, a processing unit (which Babbage called the ‘mill’), and a variety of different outputs, including printed results or more card-punching.
The Analytical Engine also inspired a historic document, all the more remarkable in its day because the author was a woman. The document was entitled ‘Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage Esq.’ and published in Taylor’s Scientific Memoirs in September 1843. The ‘Sketch’ was originally written in French by the Italian engineer Luigi Menabrea. The English translation in the Memoirs, with the addition of extensive explanatory ‘Notes’, was by Augusta Ada, Countess of Lovelace, and only product of the short-lived marriage between the poet Lord Byron and Annabella Milbanke. Ada Lovelace, who was twenty-eight years old and a mother of three when the ‘Sketch’ was published, developed a passion for mathematical ideas at an early age. With all the emotional volatility of her father – although a cruelly restricted upbringing could have had as much to do with this as genetics – her own assessment of her mathematical gifts was sometimes unrealistic. But she formed a strong intellectual bond with Babbage, and proved an able advocate of his work. Her ‘Notes’ constitute the first accessible description of the capabilities and limitations of a computer. And a century before the sensational ‘electronic brain’ articles began to appear in the British and American press, she knew better than to oversell the discovery. ‘It is desirable,’ she wrote, ‘to guard against the possibility of exaggerated ideas that might arise as to the powers of the Analytical Engine … The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate any thing. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform … Its province is to assist us in making available, what we are already acquainted with’ (her italics). Today, when commentators frequently speculate that machine intelligence is on the verge of taking over from the human variety, her remark seems as percipient as ever.
