[SIGCIS-Members] The Hunting of the Babbages

[Pierre Mounier-Kuhn]

Thanks, Brian.

I forward your message to a recognized Babbage scholar, Marie-Jo Durand-Richard, who gave us yesterday at the Séminaire d'Histoire de l'Informatique an insightful overview of the history of computing "from Pascal to von Neumann", from a perspective quite different from H. Goldstine's famous book.

A side remark: I have tried a similar inquiry to trace the lateral descendants of David/Didier Roth, the inventor of the fist digital calculator really marketed (1840). Alas, the family branches in America and Australia seem to have disappeared in the mid-XXth century.

Best,
Pierre Mounier-Kuhn 

----- Mail original -----
De: "Brian E Carpenter via Members" <members at lists.sigcis.org>
À: "members" <members at lists.sigcis.org>
Envoyé: Mercredi 2 Avril 2025 04:23:17
Objet: [SIGCIS-Members] The Hunting of the Babbages

Colleagues,

For the past month I have been delving into a box labelled “Babbage” left behind by the late Garry Tee. (The email subject refers to one of the many threads running through the box, i.e., claimed allusions to Babbage and Ada in “The Hunting of the Snark.”) Basically the box is the history of Garry's work on Babbage family and relics in New Zealand and Australia, but his correspondents range from a large number of people called Babbage, through Andrew Booth, Allan Bromley, Donald Davies, Benoit Mandelbrot, Donald Sadler and Dorothy Stein, to extensive communication with Maurice Wilkes. In total there are more than 200 correspondents.

I've written up a summary of what I've found, which isn't a finished or publishable piece of work, but I have the family's OK to share it with any Babbage scholars who'd like to know more. The final destination of the archive box is unknown, but I'm anxious that it should not be a recycling bin.

Regards
    Brian E. Carpenter
    Honorary Professor
    School of Computer Science
    The University of Auckland
    https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~brian/
    brian at cs.auckland.ac.nz
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