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So the machine I'm going to talk you about

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is what I call the greatest machine that never was.

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It was a machine that was never built,

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and yet, it will be built.

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It was a machine that was designed

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long before anyone thought about computers.

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If you know anything about the history of computers,

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you will know that in the '30s and the '40s,

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simple computers were created

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that started the computer revolution we have today,

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and you would be correct,

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except for you'd have the wrong century.

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The first computer was really designed

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in the 1830s and 1840s, not the 1930s and 1940s.

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It was designed, and parts of it were prototyped,

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and the bits of it that were built are here

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in South Kensington.

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That machine was built by this guy, Charles Babbage.

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Now, I have a great affinity for Charles Babbage

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because his hair is always completely unkempt like this

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in every single picture. (Laughter)

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He was a very wealthy man, and a sort of,

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part of the aristocracy of Britain,

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and on a Saturday night in Marylebone,

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were you part of the intelligentsia of that period,

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you would have been invited round to his house

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for a soiree — and he invited everybody:

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kings, the Duke of Wellington, many, many famous people —

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and he would have shown you one of his mechanical machines.

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I really miss that era, you know, where you could

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go around for a soiree and see a mechanical computer

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get demonstrated to you. (Laughter)

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But Babbage, Babbage himself was born

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at the end of the 18th century,

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and was a fairly famous mathematician.

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He held the post that Newton held at Cambridge,

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and that was recently held by Stephen Hawking.

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He's less well known than either of them because

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he got this idea to make mechanical computing devices

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and never made any of them.

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The reason he never made any of them, he's a classic nerd.

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Every time he had a good idea, he'd think,

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"That's brilliant, I'm going to start building that one.

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I'll spend a fortune on it. I've got a better idea.

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I'm going to work on this one. (Laughter) And I'm going to do this one."

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He did this until Sir Robert Peel, then Prime Minister,

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basically kicked him out of Number 10 Downing Street,

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and kicking him out, in those days, that meant saying,

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"I bid you good day, sir." (Laughter)

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The thing he designed was this monstrosity here,

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the analytical engine. Now, just to give you an idea of this,

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this is a view from above.

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Every one of these circles is a cog, a stack of cogs,

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and this thing is as big as a steam locomotive.

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So as I go through this talk, I want you to imagine

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this gigantic machine. We heard those wonderful sounds

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of what this thing would have sounded like.

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And I'm going to take you through the architecture of the machine

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— that's why it's computer architecture —

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and tell you about this machine, which is a computer.

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So let's talk about the memory. The memory

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is very like the memory of a computer today,

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except it was all made out of metal,

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stacks and stacks of cogs, 30 cogs high.

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Imagine a thing this high of cogs,

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hundreds and hundreds of them,

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and they've got numbers on them.

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It's a decimal machine. Everything's done in decimal.

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And he thought about using binary. The problem

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with using binary is that the machine would have been so

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tall, it would have been ridiculous. As it is, it's enormous.

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So he's got memory.

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The memory is this bit over here.

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You see it all like this.

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This monstrosity over here is the CPU, the chip, if you like.

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Of course, it's this big.

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Completely mechanical. This whole machine is mechanical.

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This is a picture of a prototype for part of the CPU

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which is in the Science Museum.

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The CPU could do the four fundamental functions of arithmetic --

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so addition, multiplication, subtraction, division --

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which already is a bit of a feat in metal,

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but it could also do something that a computer does

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and a calculator doesn't:

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this machine could look at its own internal memory and make a decision.

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It could do the "if then" for basic programmers,

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and that fundamentally made it into a computer.

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It could compute. It couldn't just calculate. It could do more.

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Now, if we look at this, and we stop for a minute,

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and we think about chips today, we can't

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look inside a silicon chip. It's just so tiny.

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Yet if you did, you would see something

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very, very similar to this.

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There's this incredible complexity in the CPU,

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and this incredible regularity in the memory.

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If you've ever seen an electron microscope picture,

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you'll see this. This all looks the same,

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then there's this bit over here which is incredibly complicated.

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All this cog wheel mechanism here is doing is what a computer does,

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but of course you need to program this thing, and of course,

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Babbage used the technology of the day

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and the technology that would reappear in the '50s, '60s and '70s,

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which is punch cards. This thing over here

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is one of three punch card readers in here,

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and this is a program in the Science Museum, just

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not far from here, created by Charles Babbage,

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that is sitting there — you can go see it —

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waiting for the machine to be built.

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And there's not just one of these, there's many of them.

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He prepared programs anticipating this would happen.

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Now, the reason they used punch cards was that Jacquard,

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in France, had created the Jacquard loom,

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which was weaving these incredible patterns controlled by punch cards,

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so he was just repurposing the technology of the day,

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and like everything else he did, he's using the technology

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of his era, so 1830s, 1840s, 1850s, cogs, steam,

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mechanical devices. Ironically, born the same year

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as Charles Babbage was Michael Faraday,

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who would completely revolutionize everything

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with the dynamo, transformers, all these sorts of things.

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Babbage, of course, wanted to use proven technology,

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so steam and things.

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Now, he needed accessories.

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Obviously, you've got a computer now.

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You've got punch cards, a CPU and memory.

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You need accessories you're going to come with.

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You're not just going to have that,

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So, first of all, you had sound. You had a bell,

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so if anything went wrong — (Laughter) —

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or the machine needed the attendant to come to it,

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there was a bell it could ring. (Laughter)

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And there's actually an instruction on the punch card

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which says "Ring the bell." So you can imagine this "Ting!"

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You know, just stop for a moment, imagine all those noises,

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this thing, "Click, clack click click click,"

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steam engine, "Ding," right? (Laughter)

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You also need a printer, obviously, and everyone needs a printer.

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This is actually a picture of the printing mechanism for

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another machine of his, called the Difference Engine No. 2,

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which he never built, but which the Science Museum

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did build in the '80s and '90s.

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It's completely mechanical, again, a printer.

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It prints just numbers, because he was obsessed with numbers,

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but it does print onto paper, and it even does word wrapping,

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so if you get to the end of the line, it goes around like that.

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You also need graphics, right?

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I mean, if you're going to do anything with graphics,

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so he said, "Well, I need a plotter. I've got a big piece of paper

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and an ink pen and I'll make it plot."

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So he designed a plotter as well,

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and, you know, at that point, I think he got pretty much

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a pretty good machine.

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Along comes this woman, Ada Lovelace.

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Now, imagine these soirees, all these great and good comes along.

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This lady is the daughter of the mad, bad

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and dangerous-to-know Lord Byron,

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and her mother, being a bit worried that she might have

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inherited some of Lord Byron's madness and badness,

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thought, "I know the solution: Mathematics is the solution.

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We'll teach her mathematics. That'll calm her down."

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(Laughter) Because of course,

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there's never been a mathematician that's gone crazy,

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so, you know, that'll be fine. (Laughter)

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Everything'll be fine. So she's got this mathematical training,

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and she goes to one of these soirees with her mother,

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and Charles Babbage, you know, gets out his machine.

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The Duke of Wellington is there, you know,

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get out the machine, obviously demonstrates it,

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and she gets it. She's the only person in his lifetime, really,

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who said, "I understand what this does,

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and I understand the future of this machine."

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And we owe to her an enormous amount because we know

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a lot about the machine that Babbage was intending to build

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because of her.

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Now, some people call her the first programmer.

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This is actually from one of -- the paper that she translated.

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This is a program written in a particular style.

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It's not, historically, totally accurate that she's the first programmer,

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and actually, she did something more amazing.

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Rather than just being a programmer,

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she saw something that Babbage didn't.

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Babbage was totally obsessed with mathematics.

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He was building a machine to do mathematics,

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and Lovelace said, "You could do more than mathematics

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on this machine." And just as you do,

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everyone in this room already's got a computer on them

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right now, because they've got a phone.

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If you go into that phone, every single thing in that phone

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or computer or any other computing device

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is mathematics. It's all numbers at the bottom.

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Whether it's video or text or music or voice, it's all numbers,

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it's all, underlying it, mathematical functions happening,

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and Lovelace said, "Just because you're doing

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mathematical functions and symbols

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doesn't mean these things can't represent

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other things in the real world, such as music."

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This was a huge leap, because Babbage is there saying,

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"We could compute these amazing functions and print out

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tables of numbers and draw graphs," — (Laughter) —

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and Lovelace is there and she says, "Look,

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this thing could even compose music if you

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told it a representation of music numerically."

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So this is what I call Lovelace's Leap.

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When you say she's a programmer, she did do some,

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but the real thing is to have said the future is going to be

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much, much more than this.

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Now, a hundred years later, this guy comes along,

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Alan Turing, and in 1936, and invents the computer all over again.

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Now, of course, Babbage's machine was entirely mechanical.

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Turing's machine was entirely theoretical.

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Both of these guys were coming from a mathematical perspective,

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but Turing told us something very important.

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He laid down the mathematical foundations

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for computer science, and said,

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"It doesn't matter how you make a computer."

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It doesn't matter if your computer's mechanical,

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like Babbage's was, or electronic, like computers are today,

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or perhaps in the future, cells, or, again,

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mechanical again, once we get into nanotechnology.

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We could go back to Babbage's machine

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and just make it tiny. All those things are computers.

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There is in a sense a computing essence.

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This is called the Church–Turing thesis.

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And so suddenly, you get this link where you say

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this thing Babbage had built really was a computer.

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In fact, it was capable of doing everything we do today

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with computers, only really slowly. (Laughter)

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To give you an idea of how slowly,

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it had about 1k of memory.

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It used punch cards, which were being fed in,

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and it ran about 10,000 times slower the first ZX81.

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It did have a RAM pack.

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You could add on a lot of extra memory if you wanted to.

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(Laughter) So, where does that bring us today?

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So there are plans.

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Over in Swindon, the Science Museum archives,

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there are hundreds of plans and thousands of pages

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of notes written by Charles Babbage about this analytical engine.

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One of those is a set of plans that we call Plan 28,

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and that is also the name of a charity that I started

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with Doron Swade, who was the curator of computing

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at the Science Museum, and also the person who drove

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the project to build a difference engine,

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and our plan is to build it.

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Here in South Kensington, we will build the analytical engine.

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The project has a number of parts to it.

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One was the scanning of Babbage's archive.

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That's been done. The second is now the study

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of all of those plans to determine what to build.

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The third part is a computer simulation of that machine,

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and the last part is to physically build it at the Science Museum.

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When it's built, you'll finally be able to understand how a computer works,

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because rather than having a tiny chip in front of you,

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you've got to look at this humongous thing and say, "Ah,

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I see the memory operating, I see the CPU operating,

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I hear it operating. I probably smell it operating." (Laughter)

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But in between that we're going to do a simulation.

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Babbage himself wrote, he said,

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as soon as the analytical engine exists,

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it will surely guide the future course of science.

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Of course, he never built it, because he was always fiddling

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with new plans, but when it did get built, of course,

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in the 1940s, everything changed.

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Now, I'll just give you a little taste of what it looks like

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in motion with a video which shows

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just one part of the CPU mechanism working.

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So this is just three sets of cogs,

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and it's going to add. This is the adding mechanism

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in action, so you imagine this gigantic machine.

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So, give me five years.

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Before the 2030s happen, we'll have it.

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Thank you very much. (Applause)