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PLAN 28 BLOG







FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2022


JANUARY 2022 REPORT TO THE COMPUTER CONSERVATION SOCIETY



Last November I reported on the successful completion of the first draft
technical description, by Tim Robinson, of the Analytical Engine designs. Since
then we have initiatives underway to increase the size of the team to take this
work further. We have a separate initiative to view working papers donated by
Anne Bromley, Allan Bromley’s widow. Allan Bromley, Australian computer
scientist, died in 2002. His work was the first attempt to study of the detail
of the Analytical Engine designs. Our study of the new Bromley papers will
enable us to assess of the scope and depth of his researches and to key Tim
Robinson’s findings into what was known before.

Doron Swade


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MONDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2021


WINTER 2021 REPORT TO THE COMPUTER CONSERVATION SOCIETY



Project Report to Computer Conservation Society Committee for Meeting Thursday
18 November 2021

The project has reached a long-awaited defining point. Tim Robinson has
completed the first draft of the most comprehensive description yet of the
Analytical Engine designs. We have for the first time both an aerial view that
integrates partial and seemingly unrelated developments, as well as the most
detailed analysis yet of the specifics of implementation.

This analysis has been a prerequisite for the build. Babbage left no design for
a complete Engine and the rationale for the ad hoc improvements made over
thirty-eight years has not, till now, been fully investigated nor understood. We
have lacked the necessary understanding to inform a meaningful build i.e. which
signature features of which design should be combined to create a single
representative machine.

The treatise, which is a product of five years research founded on a
comprehensive review of the entire technical archive, describes six phases of
development from 1832 through till Babbage’s death in 1871. At user level, Tim
describes and analyses the use of punched cards, the designs for the ‘Great
Operations’ (multiplication, division, square root), and for the ‘Small
Operations’ (including addition, subtraction, and stepping). The description and
running analysis run to some 120,000 words and includes close studies of
selected mechanisms. 

Our immediate next step is to structure and edit the material into a form usable
by others. This is both to ensure the preservation of the knowledge the document
represents, and to provide a working datum for the next stage. We are seeking to
appoint someone on a funded basis to collaborate with Tim to produce a document
to publishable standards.

In parallel with this we are set to examine the working papers of the late Prof.
Allan Bromley. Anne Bromley, Allan’s widow, has donated three large binders of
material to the Science Museum and we have made arrangements to access this
material at the Science Museum Library in the Dana Centre in South Kensington.
The Science Museum has kindly permitted us to copy the material for research
purposes. 

Bromley’s publications on the Analytical Engine are masterful, invaluable but
regrettably sparse and the extent of his very considerable understanding of the
designs is certainly underrepresented in his published output. The examination
of these papers will, it is hoped, corroborate our new understanding as well as
reveal just how far he had succeeded in decoding Babbage’s intentions.

Doron Swade

 




 




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SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2021


AUTUMN 2021 REPORT TO THE COMPUTER CONSERVATION SOCIETY



Submitted by Doron Swade to the Computer Conservation Society.

Winding back to last Spring, with the survey of the Babbage manuscript archive
complete, we were faced with the choice of pressing on to define what might be
built using our current knowledge, or stepping back to evaluate and analyse what
was captured in the review of the archive. We decided to step back and Tim
Robinson has made substantial progress extending and integrating our
understanding of the AE design and its trajectory from 1834 till Babbage’s death
in 1871. Tim has identified and describes six phases in the evolution of the AE
designs.

These are framed in an overview of the developmental timeline of the whole AE
enterprise. There are also focussed pieces on central topics including the use
of punched cards, the user view, methods of carriage of tens, and arithmetical
process. This work represents the first comparative overview of each of the
major designs ('Plans') and provides a new depth of understanding of the overall
AE designs and of the developmental arc. The new findings vindicate the decision
to take time out to process the material from the archive survey: the work will
inform what can meaningful be built given that none of Babbage’s original
designs describe a complete engine; secondly, the scholarly value of capturing
and documenting a major advance in understanding since Bruce Collier’s work in
the 1960s and Allan Bromley’s work in the 1970s and 80s. The immediate next step
is to complete this analysis. The project will then move on to defining what
version of the AE should be built.

Doron Swade


Posted by John Graham-Cumming at 9:41 AM 10 comments:
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THURSDAY, MARCH 25, 2021


SPRING 2021 REPORT TO THE COMPUTER CONSERVATION SOCIETY



Submitted by Doron Swade to the Computer Conservation Society.

Tim Robinson has started writing up findings following the review of the
complete Babbage manuscript archive. The initial work is in the form of an
overview centred on each of the ‘Plans’ i.e. the large ‘systems drawings’ that
Babbage shed during the evolution of the designs. The intention was to put to
one side further detailed work, for the moment at least, to take stock and to
document broad-stroke findings and new insights. Excavating further the
hardly-known Plan 30 (there is a Plan 28a but seemingly no Plan 29) proved
irresistible both for inherent interest and for completeness. Babbage restarted
work on the AE designs in June 1857 after a break of almost a decade and
referred to the machine as ‘Analytical Engine 30’. Tim reports that the hardware
changes introduced for Plan 30 are ‘dramatic’. One remarkable feature is the
extension of the Store to 1000 registers, and most intriguingly various methods
of mechanically addressing the store contents. The broad-stroke writing has been
paused temporarily while this rich seam is explored. It is not expected to take
long and we look forward do the resumption of the interpretative account.

Doron Swade 


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TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 2021


JANUARY 2021 REPORT TO THE COMPUTER CONSERVATION SOCIETY



Presented by Doron Swade on Monday 21 January 2021 to the Computer Conservation
Society.

With the first-pass inspection of the manuscript archive complete, attention has
turned to analysis and interpretation, and organising the findings to aid
navigation. Babbage shed versions of the design as it developed in the form of
‘Plans’ – large ‘systems drawings’ which serve as developmental staging posts –
the main ones of which number Plan 1 through to Plan 28. The overall approach to
analysing the accumulated data is that of a timeline that groups all material,
from wherever in the archive (drawings, Notebooks, Notations), to each of the
landmark Plans.

The significance of the design advances for each Plan is identified as each is
reviewed and evaluated, whether, for example, a new Plan involves a major design
reset or only incremental change. From this, the first fruits of the extensive
study of the sources are now emerging and the overall developmental arc is now
easier to identify. A major initial finding is that the designs are less
disjointed than thought and there is more continuity in the inventive trajectory
than we feared was the case, or that scholarship to date had indicated. As an
example of a more specific finding: it is not until Plan 27 that there is the
first evidence of user-level conditional operation. While the Analytical Engine
is routinely portrayed as incorporating, from the start, defining features of a
modern computer conditional operation included, this feature appears fairly late
in the day and is barely mentioned again. How significant to Babbage was
conditional operation as a defining feature, is now an enticing open question.

This work is being undertaken by Tim Robinson in the US. Progress was slowed in
by climate crises in California not to mention political and pandemic
disruption. The initial findings are a long-awaited reward after some four years
examining primary sources.

Doron Swade


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MONDAY, JUNE 1, 2020


SPRING 2020 REPORT TO THE COMPUTER CONSERVATION SOCIETY


Presented by Doron Swade on Thursday 14 May 2020 to the Computer Conservation
Society


The Babbage technical archive held by the Science Museum has been reviewed sheet
by sheet so the reference sources of AE-related content are now known. After a
short hiatus Tim Robinson is carrying out the same exercise on the Babbage
material in the Buxton papers held in Oxford. This material is of particular
interest not least because there are several essays Babbage wrote on the
Analytical Engine while in Italy immediately after his visit to Turin in 1840
where he gave his first and only seminar-lecture on the Analytical Engine at a
convention of mathematicians, surveyors and scientists. This rare engagement
with others was a significant stimulus to Babbage so his writings immediately
following this are of special interest. We have done two substantial photo
shoots (2015, 2016 and 2018) of this manuscript material, so digitised images
are to hand. Part of the difficulty with is that the manuscripts are
unsympathetically bound (text lost in the binding gutters), some material is
undated, and the manuscripts are not bound in chronological order. We are also
currently planning on the best way to document the findings so far, for wider
dissemination - this a lesson learned from the material left by the late Allan
Bromley who regrettably published only a small part of his deep understanding of
the AE design.


Doron Swade

Posted by John Graham-Cumming at 3:03 AM 1 comment:
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FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2019


AUTUMN 2019 REPORT TO THE COMPUTER CONSERVATION SOCIETY


This was presented by Doron Swade on September 19, 2019 to the Computer
Conservation Society


In a visit from the US in March Tim Robinson reviewed a collection of ‘mystery’
material consisting of content that had eluded listing or cataloguing in earlier
programmes by the Science Museum, and by Allan Bromley who produced, in 1991,
the first near-comprehensive listing of the Babbage technical archive.  Logging
this last cache of material is now complete and it appears that only about a
third of the original material survives. This estimate is based on references in
the Sketchbooks to material that should be in this cache but were not found
there, or elsewhere. Findings have been shared with Science Museum archivists
accompanied by suggestions of how this material might fit into the structure of
the new Babbage catalogue, available now online, created by the Science Museum.
There is material in the Buxton archive in Oxford that awaits attention but the
primary technical archive of Babbage papers held by the Science Museum has now
been viewed and relevance to the AE design logged.

With the archive review essentially complete, a process that took over three
years, Tim has shifted attention to developing a simulation environment to
describe, explore, and verify the mechanical designs. So far this involves
‘logical’ simulation which features aspects of Babbage’s Mechanical Notation,
the language of signs and symbols he devised to describe the machines and as a
design aid, not unlike a later Hardware Description Language (HDL). Features of
the Mechanical Notation that are reflected in the simulation tools include the
notion of a ‘piece’ (an aggregation of parts that acts or is acted on as an
ensemble), ‘working points’ (the points of influence and action between pieces),
‘assemblies’ and ‘connections’. It is hoped that this high-level simulation will
be extended in due course to solid modelling and techniques for visualisation as
a design aid, a manufacturing front-end, and for education.

Doron Swade

Posted by John Graham-Cumming at 4:28 AM 5 comments:
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