User Experience 24-28
Here you go! There’s a 2 page spread in there you’ll have to click to enlarge..
Notes, read them or be eaten by a Grue!
No doubt Babbage is kicking himself for not having invented the flowchart, a notation which would have been much after his way of thinking.
Readers of this comic will know how old they are by their recognition of Zork jokes. I myself am old enough to have spent a summer at a university youth program playing Zork on a TELETYPE (warning, LOUD youtube link!), I kid you not (I believe I was meant to be learning elementary statistics, which is surely what all 13 year old girls REALLY want to be doing all summer..). To all saying “Surely you can’t be that old!” oh bless you hearts.
The latin (YES THIS TIME IT’S REALLY LATIN!) from Ovid’s Metamorphosis:
Great Daedalus of Athens was the man
That made the draught, and form’d the wondrous plan;
Where rooms within themselves encircled lye,
With various windings, to deceive the eye.
As soft Maeander’s wanton current plays,
When thro’ the Phrygian fields it loosely strays;
Backward and forward rouls the dimpl’d tide,
Seeming, at once, two different ways to glide:
While circling streams their former banks survey,
And waters past succeeding waters see:
Now floating to the sea with downward course,
Now pointing upward to its ancient source,
Such was the work, so intricate the place,
That scarce the workman all its turns cou’d trace;
And Daedalus was puzzled how to find
The secret ways of what himself design’d.
I’m going to spend all day rooting around for a thing I’m sure I have stashed somewhere of Babbage describing his difficulties in understanding his own engine! The intricacies of his device led him to several goes at creating what a ‘mechanical notation’– some of which bear a pleasing resemblance to circuit diagrams. It’s hard to think of a mechanism of the period that would have needed such a detailed system, but Babbage himself considered it one of his greatest inventions and was painfully sore at not having this opinion universally shared.. or as shared at all, as far as I can tell!
Mechanical Notation in his autobiography (with bonus THOSE FOOLS AT THE ROYAL SOCIETY rant)
His first paper on his notation, 1826
Covered along with other attempts at kinematic notation, in the fascinating Kinematics of Machinery, translated from the French (always bigger Babbage supporters than the English) in 1876. Quotage:
No notice was taken of it by those practically interested in machinery, and by this want of attention they added unconsciously to the great irritation which displayed itself in the work which Babbage published shortly before his death [editor pauses to hug Babbage]. In this he struck about him most vehemently, like Timon of Athens with his spade, accusing his contemporaries of their want of comprehension and appreciation of his work. Without in the least depreciating, however his most important labours in other directions, it must be said that the cause of the non-acceptance of his system of notation was due to its own defects, and not to those of the public [editor pauses to hug F. Reuleaux, author of 'Kinematics of Machinery']
An interesting attempt to extend on Babbage’s system, 1870 (with *ahem!* extensive quotations from Babbage’s writings not clearly indicated..)
And finally, a dismaying lack of faith in their readership from the Quarterly Journal of Science, Literature, and the Arts
I assure you I automatically assume every single one of MY readers will devote the next weeks of their lives to a careful study of all these documents!
