Finish the Work of Ada LoveLace and Charles Babbage

This essay is about a suggested student project in Java programming. This essay gives a rough overview of how it might work. It does not describe an actual complete program. I have no source, object, specifications, file layouts or anything else useful to implementing this project. Everything I have to say to help you with this project is written below. I am not prepared to help you implement it; I have too many other projects of my own.

I do contract work for a living, which could include writing a program such as this. However, I don’t do people’s homework for them. That just robs them of an education.

You have my full permission to implement this project any way you please.

Back in 1830 Lovelace and Babbage worked on an analytical engine, mechanical computer. In theory it would have been capable of computing Bernouli numbers. The gears of the day were not precise enough and had to much friction, so the machine never worked. Your job is to complete the project in two possible ways:

Discover all you can about the analytical engine, and create a simulator for it. Your simulator could merely simulate it programming language, or it could be so elaborate as to provide a 3D view of the internal workings of its perfect gears whirring about from any point of view, or like being a mouse in the clockworks.
Using modern high accuracy machining and materials, actually build a mechanical analytical engine.

When you are done, surely many museums would be interested in the result.

In a related project, the ancient Mayans had a mechanical calculator for doing calendar calculations. Some people have made computer simulations.

Other early computers you might like to simulate:

Herman Hollerith’s tablulating machine for the 1900 US census.
ABC, the first electronic but non-progammable computer by John V. Atanasoff and Clifford Berry.
Robinson, by Alan Turing and project Ultra, used to successfully decode the Nazi Enigma code during WW II.
Z-3 the first programmable electronic computer by Konrad Zuse and Arnold Fast.
Some of the old IBM unit record equipment you programmed with gold-tipped wires, such as the 407 Lister.
The Librascope, Royal McBee, General Precision, Control Data, LGP-30 — my first personal computer.
The Altair 8080, the first personal computer.

Commodore 64 simulator
Eniac Simulator
Virtual Machine
Wheel Within A Wheel
ZX Spectrum simulator

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