April 15, 2018 Sunday
Bedtime Story
Note A of Ada Lovelace - Part 8
Tonight we are continuing with the Note A
of Ada Lovelace wherein she is pointing out that besides all the other distinctions
between the two engines, what really set apart the Analytical Engine from the
Difference Engine was the idea of using the punched cards in the former.
Now most of us average apes that exist
today and use computers on a daily basis are little aware that almost till
mid-1970s (the decade that I arrived here), programs for the computers (who instruct
the machines what to do) were written, edited and stored, line by line, on
punched cards.
Such kind of programs was absolute machine
languages and the punched cards were flexible write–once medium that encoded
commonly 80 characters.
A typical university computer those days
consisted of series of rooms, with one air-conditioned room for the computer
proper (these days such special treatment is reserved for servers housed in dedicated
data centers).
One room next to it would be stacked with
large number of keypunch machines totally dedicated for programmers to literally
punch out their instructions.
Even such well known early programming
languages such as Fortran and Cobol were punched out on the first 72 columns of
cards, columns from 73 to 80 being used merely for identifying the sequence of
cards on card deck, very helpful in cases of dropped or misplaced cards.
“The distinctive characteristic of the
Analytical Engine, and that which has rendered it possible to endow mechanism
with such extensive facilities as bid fait to make this engine the executive
right-hand of abstract algebra, is the introduction into it of the principle
which Jacquard devised for regulating, by means of punched cards, the
complicated patterns in the fabrication of brocaded stuffs.
It is in this that the distinction between
the two engines lies.
Nothing of the sort exists in Difference
Engine.
We may so most aptly, that the Analytical
Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and
leaves.
Here, it seems to us, resides much more of
originality than the Difference Engine can be fairly entitled to claim.
We do not wish to deny to this latter all
such claims.
We believe that it is the only proposal or
attempt ever made to construct a calculating machine founded on the principle
of successive orders of differences, and capable of printing off its own
results; and that this engine surpasses its predecessors, both in the extent of
the calculations which it can perform, in the facility, certainty and accuracy
with which it can affect them, and in the absence of all necessity for the
intervention of human intelligence during the performance of its calculations.
Its nature is, however, limited to the
strictly arithmetical, and it is far from being the first or only scheme for
constructing arithmetical calculating machines with more or less success.
The bounds of arithmetic were however
outstepped the moment the idea of applying the cards had occurred; and the
Analytical Engine does not occupy the common ground with mere “calculating
machines”.
It holds a position wholly its own; and the
considerations it suggests are most interesting in their nature.”
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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