Dear Brian, Congratulation on the article about Percy Ludgate -- thank you for sharing it! Certainly someone that we need to know more about, because he left us, I think, key comments on critical occasions. Including this: "It must be admitted, however, that the true automatic calculating machine belongs to a possible rather than an actual class". The absence of "true" automatic calculating machines, now considered to be the exemplar mechanical ancestors of the 'digital', meant, for Ludgate, extension of the dependence on humans "operators" (from the celebrated catalog of the 1914 Edinburgh World Fair-- nothing short of a Bible, I think, for us historians of computing technology). Happy New Year to all the colleagues and friends of this invaluable list, may 2021 not bring "true" automation so that us humans continue to be as indispensable as ever, Aristotle
Hi:
I had a number of very quick responses to my query. As a result, I now know that Baxandall's 1926 Science Museum publication was largely reused in both the 1929 and 1940 editions of Encyclopedia Britannica, and each time Ludgate was mentioned, but only as someone who had designed a difference engine. No mention was made of the fact that he had designed, and indeed published a paper describing his design for, an analytical
engine. This seems to have been completely forgotten by the time of World
War 2.
My thanks to all who responded to my request.
Season's greetings, everyone.
Brian Randell
—
School of
Computing, Newcastle University, 1 Science Square, Newcastle
upon Tyne, NE4 5TG EMAIL = Brian.Randell@ncl.ac.uk PHONE = +44 191 208 7923 URL = http://www.ncl.ac.uk/computing/people/profile/brianrandell.html
On 28/12/2020, 16:10, "Brian Randell"
<brian.randell@newcastle.ac.uk>
wrote:
Hi:
Season's Greetings everyone!
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