the Difference Engine   by Doron Swade

Feb. 2006     A Christmas gift from my loving, book-addict Mother.

Interesting book. I mostly read fiction, so I wasn't too sure what to expect from this book -which relates the true past. The tale is about Babbage, who was an inventor in England nearly 200 years ago. He designed an automatic Adding machine, (which there were no good working models of at the time,) and then went on to outline a general purpose mathematical machine. One which could perform addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. We may think of that as a calculator, but he was more specific about what his machine could do: he planned to have punch cards which would tell the machine what steps to take, as well as a large storage area, where many numbers could be saved, and then accessed depending on what the particular punch-card program needed.

Basically, he designed the workings of a computer, -150 years before such a thing was going to be built.

The book tells of his invention, and his life, and the ongoing struggle against various circumstances which prevented him from ever building his "adding machine." (The book then ends with the tale of how the Museum curators managed to build his Adding machine -not his proto-computer, just in time for Babbage's 200th birthday. And this was the first time his machine was ever made.)

The atmosphere in the book was well evoked; I had a good feeling of the victorian world that Babbage lived in. Not only the technical side, but also the political side, (which had a great deal to do with what work he could do,) and the social side.

Oddly, thinking about it now, I don't think I liked the second half of the book as much of the first. (The second half takes place in the 1980s, and is about the building of the first Babbage Engine.) It was still interesting, to see how modern machining is so different to what was possible 200 years ago, and to see what things Haven't changed. But... the atmosphere wasn't there. I didn't enjoy the world in which this story took place. (I don't know if it's because I don't care for the world of that time, or because I didn't have any feeling of that world from the text.) Anyhow, the feeling wasn't there.

And I can think of nothing else to say, so there's really no point in my continuing writing.