HIST212 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Charles Babbage Institute, Web 2.0, Technocracy
18 Apr 2018
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There are 2 ways of looking at change overtime: technological evolution - slow, continuous, incremental changes, technological revolution. The characters in chapter 3 (babbage, ada lovelace, analog computers, harvard. Babbage never nished anything, and his designs had no in uence on modern computers; by inference lady ada is even more insigni cant. Analog computers are obsolete, have been for 70 years; were replaced by general purpose computing devices as soon as possible. Alan turing"s contributions are vastly overrated, unless you"re a computer scientist. There is no connection to current technologies, companies, and leaders. We need to discuss these 4 assertions and prove at least 2 of them wrong. Signi cance should be be measured in impact (results in change) and revelations (reveals something) . Led to aiken being inspired by babbage"s ideas and working on the harvard mark i. Many other people were probably inspired as well. People in the mid-late 1950"s started re-creating his ideas.
