The Neukom Institute at Dartmouth presents:
Mission Impossible: Constructing Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine
Given by Doron Swade on May 8th at Dartmouth College

Computing is widely viewed as a phenomenon of the electronic age. The mechanical prehistory of computing tends to be seen as a cozy gas-lit back-story to the undoubted triumphs of modernity, but a past to which the electronic computer owes little. So it perhaps surprising to claim that the core ideas in the realisation of the modern computer emerged explicitly in the 19th century in the designs for vast automatic calculating engines conceived by the English mathematician Charles Babbage, and in the work of Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron. Babbage's work has been revisited in the modern era: his massive Difference Engine No. 2, designed in the late 1840s but unbuilt in his lifetime, was completed in 2002, and a project is now underway to construct for the first time his legendary Analytical Engine, the first design for a full-fledged, automatic, programmable, digital computing machine. This presentation reviews Babbage's pioneering work on automatic computing, locates his work in its historical context, and describes the scale, scope and planned outcomes for the construction of the Analytical Engine.

For information about the ongoing effort: plan28.org
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~neukom/