Desiree will imagine him standing on a timeless street,
I finished The Difference Engine yesterday afternoon. Part of it was very good and the other part, no so much.
The first 2/3 of the book is a pretty straightforward biography of Charles Babbage, with a focus on his work on his various computing Engines and the events surrounding that, but also with a fair amount of information about surrounding events. This was pretty cool stuff. The last third of the book is about the efforts of the author and others to construct a fully functioning Difference Engine with techniques and materials as closely as they could. This is some boring stuff — mostly complaints about the difficulty of building the Engine, getting funding, and getting things assembled in time. The book is capped off by the inevitable “Yay, it works!” moment which is not particularly interesting because, of course, if the thing hadn’t worked there wouldn’t have been a book in the first place. This last section sapped almost all of the good will I’d had for the first part of the book, but I think overall I’m glad I read it.
I was going to share some anecdotes and stuff about Babbage and his quest for a thinking machine, but I’m tired and I don’t feel like it. I would suggest this book, or at least some biography of Babbage, to anyone interested in such things.
I’m now reading Terry Pratchett’s Monstrous Regiment and digging it about as much as I have the last few Discworld books.