Comments on: Porlock Revisited

By: 2D Goggles » Ada Lovelace Day!

2D Goggles » Ada Lovelace Day! — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 20:32:54 +0000

[...] have been out to get me last week. As we all know last year’s Ada Lovelace Day post triggered a near-catastrophic disturbance in the space-time continuum resulting in the creation of a pocket universe. To prevent a similar breach this year, bad-luck [...]

By: Laura J

Laura J — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 15:03:31 +0000

Thank you for the Asterix reference. Enjoying the adventures greatly. Please carry on.

By: sydney

sydney — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 14:27:42 +0000

I understand Mecchano is the preferred medium! I believe there’s never been a complete model built, but tshirts may be given for cooleness…

I had a brief crazy plan to try modelling a virtual one (for more accurate comics) but couldn’t find clear plans.. let me know if you find some!

By: Subilial

Subilial — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 05:10:18 +0000

I’m taking you up on the free t-shirt deal. At least one replica exists, and I fancy myself as bit of an engineer. Hopefully, I will soon have a working analytical engine to show off, and a t-shirt, too.

By: sydney

sydney — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 22:53:34 +0000

There’s a wonderful book, “Glory and Failure”, about the various Difference Engines of this period– out of print unfortuantely but you can read a fair bit of it on google books– and I was lucky enough to find it in a library. Truly fascinating, about the decisions that each maker took.. there’s a Scheutz engine next to the Difference Engine build in the Science Museum in London, it’s so much smaller that for the longest time I thought it was a model!

By: Therru

Therru — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 16:31:12 +0000

I don’t know if you’ve seen this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_Georg_Scheutz

I ran across it as I was reading up on the Difference Engine. The article says that what P.G. Scheutz and hos son Edvard built wasn’t Babbage’s Difference Engine as such, but an “improved model”, whatever that means. :) But the fact remains that although Babbage never built the engine himself, other people did, or at least modified versions of it.

By: 2D Goggles » The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage

2D Goggles » The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 19:34:32 +0000

[...] representative half-baked episodes would be Lovelace and Babbage Vs The Salamander People,, or Porlock Revisited. These are filed under [...]

By: 2D Goggles » Babbage and Lovelace Vs The Client

2D Goggles » Babbage and Lovelace Vs The Client — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 00:01:39 +0000

[...] sydneypadua.com presents a hideous mutant offshoot « Porlock Revisited [...]

By: Ceridwen

Ceridwen — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 02:36:56 +0000

So this is what the punch cards were meant to do, then?

Gerald Hawkins explains about the IBM that was used to get his calculations in Stonehenge Decoded. Someone punches up a bunch of holes in a card, which is then run through the machine. Some time later (I think it was days but I may be misremembering, it’s been a while since I read the book) the machine spit out the alignments. Those early computers were pretty big monsters, too, filling an entire room.

By: sydney

sydney — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 13:00:19 +0000

This isn’t actually the punch-card bit– the drums ran what you’d now call microprograms that dealt with certain kinds of instructions from the punchcards. Firmware, if you will!