A brief history of computers

Thank you to the author for creating this! This style of super personal historical overview is very enjoyable. I like how the author says outright to take everything with a grain of salt and I like how they call out things about the narrative that don't make sense to them.

Babbage had a chance to build his difference engine. The problem was that the engineering was a lot harder than he thought it was going to be, and he was a mathematician/economist, not so much a working engineer. The idea that if only he had had a better chance the difference engine would’ve been successful is just simply a misreading of what happened. It didn’t help that after the British government poured tens of thousands of pounds into the project Babbage suddenly decided to start pushing analytical engine before he had even finished the difference engine. That made it look like these were just wild, cockeyed schemes, when Babbage was supposed to be engaged in a practical, mechanical calculating project (to help reduce the labor expended on computing, for example, navigational tables).

The computer wasn't really invented at all. It evolved from earlier things in a step-wise manner. There were computing machines for decades prior. E.g. before WW1 there were sophisticated gunnery computers that could fire shells taking account the vector velocity of a ship, wind, distance measured optically, movement of the attacking ship. Boolean logic was used in telephone switching systems. Boolean circuits already existed both in electromechanical form (relays) and electronics (vacuum tubes|valves). So when Turing decided he needed a machine to do so and so calculations on some kind of data, Flowers didn't need to invent Boolean logic nor design Boolean circuits -- those already existed off the shelf. Teleprinters existed. Paper tape existed.