[MUSIC PLAYING]
[APPLAUSE]
SYDNEY PADUA: Thank you.
You all have comics there.
So I actually don't have to
talk, which would be great.
You'll have to bear with me.
I still get nervous occasionally
in talks, especially when I'm
speaking to computery people.
Because I'm not a--
I'm not a computery
people at all--
computer person at
all, which is what
makes it strange to be
talking on technical subjects
at Google for a few times.
So this is me normally.
I'm an animator, cartoonist.
My day job is this
sort of thing--
visual effects, which
I do do on computers,
but very reluctantly.
I started on "Iron Giant"
hand-drawn on paper
like a medieval peasant.
Nowadays, of course,
we do everything
on these big machines,
which I actually
used to resent quite a
bit, which is strange.
It's a bit strange
that I wound up
doing this comic about
these two crazy kids.
If you don't know
who they are, you
might have briefly passed
by them in Computers 101--
Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace.
I first met them in 2009 when
a friend of mine, Sue Charman,
started "Ada Lovelace Day,"
which you might have heard of--
sort of online festival
of women in computing.
And we were in a pub.
And she said, Syd, you should--
you're a woman in tech.
You should do a comic.
You should do a post
for Ada Lovelace Day.
So I said, I don't even
know who Ada Lovelace is.
And I'm also not really in tech.
So I just quickly Wikipedia-ed
her like anybody would do.
And it was just such
an extraordinary story.
And to me, it struck
me as very comic booky.
So I just sat down in an
evening and dashed off
the following comic,
which this is cleaned up
from its initial appearance.
And this was just to introduce
Ada Lovelace and Charles
Babbage to people who might
not know who they are.
So Lord Byron, famous
poet and batcase,
was married to
Annabella Milbanke,
amateur mathematician.
They split when Ada
was about a year old.
Ada never met her father.
He fled the country in a cloud
of scandal, never came back.
And Ada's mother
was very concerned
that she would inherit her
father's "wild blood," what
people called this
poetical tendency.
So Ada's mother's
solution to this
was to train her in
mathematics, logic, and science.
So she had a very unusual
education for a girl.
Charles Babbage, a
Lucasian Professor
of Mathematics-- a
position held by Newton,
currently held by
Stephen Hawking.
So you can tell he's
a pretty clever guy.
In his own age, he
was extremely famous
for these mysterious
calculating machines
that he was burning through
government money designing.
The most famous is
the difference engine,
mostly because the
name is really cool.
And it also has a book, "The
Difference Engine" written
about what if he had built it.
They met in 1833.
And Ada immediately fell madly
in love with this machine.
The fragment of the
difference engine
you can still see in
the science museum.
It's a wonderful object.
It's about this
big, made of brass.
That's the only
part that was ever
built of any of these machines.
But the one that she--
what she was really
intrigued with was the--
oh, sorry, this gag.
[LAUGHTER]
This gag, I think, might
have spelled my doom.
[LAUGHTER]
So after she met
Babbage, she immediately
asked him for the
blueprints for this device.
She was very, very
keen on machinery.
She'd always been a fan of
taking apart little machines
and clocks, doing factory
tours, that sort of thing.
So she was very, very
keen on this device.
But the one she was really
into was the analytical engine,
which was Babbage's
next piece of vaporware,
which was a machine like
the difference engine.
So the difference engine
was a machine for addition,
to print logarithmic tables.
It was basically
a gigantic adder
that could print in order to
print these books of tables
that would be used by actuaries
or navigators or whoever.
Pretty much the same year he
met Ada, in the early 1830s,
Babbage came up with an idea
for a much more complex machine.
The analytical engine would be--
would, first of
all, have a memory.
So it could store the results.
And then, it could feed the
results back into the machine
and use them.
And the whole thing was
programmed with punch cards.
And a little later in the talk,
I'll show you how it worked.
In pretty much
every possible way,
except for being made of
brass and driven by steam,
it was a computer.
Babbage worked on very,
very elaborate designs--
thousands of pages of
notebooks on this machine.
Unfortunately,
because he had already
failed to build a considerably
less complicated machine,
he wasn't able to
secure any more funding
for his analytical engine.
But he worked on
it for many years.
For Ada, it was this machine
that she was very deeply
fascinated with.
She knew Babbage
for about a decade
before writing this paper
that she's so famous for.
And being a woman, of
course, her position
had to be on the
side looking in.
But her big chance
came in '42 when
there was a publication in a
French paper from an Italian
who had transcribed a speech of
Babbage's in Turin, in Italy.
This was the only really public
presentation Babbage had ever
done on the analytical engine.
He was not secretive about it,
but he wasn't really pushing it
that much.
So Ada took this paper and
translated it into English,
because translation was an
acceptable position for a woman
in science at that time.
However, because she
was so into this machine
and because she had many
ideas of her own about it,
she began adding footnotes.
And when the paper
came out in '43--
I should say this is
from the original comic.
So this is actually
the wrong date.
In '43, her notes
were published.
And the footnotes were
about three times as long
as the original paper
that she was transcribing.
And in those footnotes,
there's all sorts
of really interesting things.
The first description
of a loop, for example;
some wonderful programs, I
guess you would call them
in a way; and her thoughts
on the engine, which
we'll get into later.
This is the program,
Bernoulli numbers.
It's more of what you'd
call a state table.
It's just describing
the setup of the machine
in each particular iteration
of what it's doing.
Unfortunately, of
course, Ada Lovelace
died very young at 36 years old.
And Babbage never did
finish any of his machines.
So this is me coming to the
end of the story in Wikipedia
and thinking, well, I can't
end the comic like that.
That's rah, rah, rah.
That's a really dumb ending.
So I added the following panel.
And I think I was vaguely
aware of steampunk as a thing.
I hadn't read "The
Difference Engine,"
this famous book where they
actually build the machine.
But I had heard of it.
So I just added this to give a
nice punch line to the comic.
I think I was thinking
of the Avengers.
[LAUGHTER]
If you see them, they actually--
[LAUGHTER]
Eh?
I also added the following,
because something
to bear in mind is I do
hate computers very much.
So there were two
big misconceptions
about this panel.
The first misconception
is that it turned up all
over the internet
a couple of days
after I put up this little
comic strip, all of which
you've seen at this stage.
It turned up, I think,
in "Wired" and a couple
of other places
saying, this person
is going to do a comic
about Ada Lovelace
and Charles Babbage
fighting crime, which
I had no intention of doing.
This was a joke.
[LAUGHTER]
The other misconception is
that they're superheroes.
They are not.
They're clearly super
villains, because they invented
this horrible
thing, the computer,
which was the misery of my
life pretty much every day.
So the gag here
is Ada, of course,
was raised to
destroy all poetry.
And Charles Babbage,
famous as he
was for inventing these
calculating machines,
was much more famous at the
end of his life for his crusade
against street
music, which made him
infamous in late
Victorian England.
Let's see if we can
find more about that.
Anyway, I'm very suggestible.
And I was putting off
working on something else.
So I started this
comic, "2D Goggles."
And it was very,
very, very informal.
It was really just a
way of blowing off steam
at the end of the
day, and to draw
as well, because in animation,
of course, we don't draw.
We manipulate
objects in 3D space.
So I missed drawing.
And I was like, eh, if
I draw a little comic.
In this comic, they fight crime.
They fight crime badly because
otherwise it wouldn't be funny.
I think the thing
that eventually,
through a strange
series of events,
resulted me in being
here is Google Books.
And I'm really not just saying
this because I originally
designed this talk for
Google Books in California.
Google Books is what
transformed this
from a little squib of a comic
into something that I think
was genuinely interesting.
The comic began when Google
Books was at very early stages.
And it was dumping the
19th century searchable
online in a way that had
never happened before.
And that meant any
random clown, such as me,
could just type
"Babbage", "Lovelace,"
into these search terms and turn
up just sheer amounts of stuff.
This is very typical.
I think the first thing that
I was really surprised to find
was that Babbage and Lovelace
were very, very famous
people in their period.
Lovelace was a celebrity child.
And Babbage was actually a
big time celebrity himself
as this intellectual who had
invented this amazing thing
that nobody could understand.
So this is from
the "Deseret News"
in Utah, just a piece
of anecdotes about them,
which is very commonly
the way this shows up.
I like this one, "Babbage the
logarithmetical Frankenstein."
[LAUGHTER]
Lovelace shows up considerably
less than Babbage.
"Lady Lovelace, he was amused
by my saying that Babbage
and not Byron should
have been her father."
She was apparently
a bit of a bore.
That's one of the things we can
get out of people's anecdotes
about her is that she was
a bit of a drag talking
about mathematics at dinner
parties, which I advise you not
to do.
So you get a ton of stuff
on Babbage all the time,
not so much about Lovelace
because she's much more--
being female, of course,
she's a less public figure.
But it was enough
to start adding
these little bits to the blog.
So this is the way that
the blog developed.
This would be the
end of the comic.
Here's Ada Lovelace
being chased by monkeys
as, of course, you are.
And then they'd be followed
by all these footnotes, which
would be whatever stuff I had
found online just browsing
around--
training methods
of organ grinder's
monkeys, the
Bridgewater Treatise,
which was this thing
that Babbage wrote.
So through that combination of
improvising online and reading,
I guess, eyewitness accounts
of them in the period,
I was constructing
these characters.
And they're very consciously
comic book characters.
They're not intended as
a reproduction of them
as historical people.
But they're, I guess, a riff
or an improvisation on them.
Lovelace, and here's Baggage.
Baggage is always very
easy to draw because he
wrote tons of stuff, actually.
Even though, weirdly, the only
thing he didn't write about
was the analytical engine.
He wrote about taxation.
And he wrote about copyright.
And he wrote this
massive autobiography
that's super
entertaining-- very, very
funny, entertaining guy.
So his personality
is super clear.
I was really pleased to
find this in "Punch."
So this is him in 1852.
He's really angry that his--
they didn't put the engine,
the difference engine
bit in the Great Exhibition.
So he was only
honorably mentioned.
So he's pretty mad.
But I think he comes out.
This is-- so just to--
it said I talk about my process
of creative transformations.
So I guess that's what I'll do.
So this is the "New
York Mirror," 1833.
This is the same
year she met Baggage.
I don't-- if you can read
it, it says, "Oh, fie.
It is said that Ada Byron, sole
daughter of the noble Bard,
is the most coarse and vulgar
woman in England," which
is one of those things
that is very intriguing.
And it's true.
In her letters, she
does swear, which
is very unusual for
a Victorian woman.
This is something else I found.
This is from-- this is actually
from Babbage's pamphlet
on the Great Exhibition,
which is mostly
about why isn't my engine
in the Great Exhibition,
where he is describing
what it can do.
And one of the things
that he describes
is the world's
first error pop-up.
If you put the
wrong logarithm in,
it will put a plate that would
snap up and say, "wrong."
[LAUGHTER]
In his autobiography, he
adds the continually ringing
loud bell, which would
be fantastic, I'm sure,
if you were the guy in
charge of the machine.
So with this, I came
up with Ada Lovelace
is debugging one of her
programs here in the engine.
[LAUGHTER]
Babbage is showing the engine
to Queen Victoria, of course.
[LAUGHTER]
So the comic, generally
speaking, if you read the book,
it's mostly me making
fun of computers
and just using these hapless
people as my tools for this.
But I was able to find as
well some really magical stuff
in Google Books-- and
I guess important,
unimportant, but really
important stuff as well.
This is a letter
that would certainly
have been lost to
scholarship if it
hadn't been for Google Books.
Because it only
appears, as far as I
know, in a very obscure journal
called "The Southern Review,"
Maryland, 1864.
And they're just
printing letters home
from people and
just random stuff.
And there's a guy who
met Babbage in there.
And we have here, "Babbage spoke
highly of a mathematical powers
and a peculiar capability
higher, he said,
than that of anyone
he knew to prepare."
I believe it was the
descriptions connected
with his calculating machine.
He says, "I fear I'm not
expressing myself rightly here
as to the precise
nature of the subject."
I think the descriptions is
the state tables, the programs,
which is--
it's pretty magical to
find something like that.
It's quite long.
He really goes into
the relationship.
This is a couple of
years after Ada had died.
So that kind of thing--
I guess the intersection
between scholarship
and primary sources, and
then just improvisation
and imagination-- that's what
the comic was basically about.
So these two
characters, I think,
became pretty clear to me.
When I had to sit
down to write a book--
I didn't have to sit
down to write a book.
But they told me to write
a book, so I wrote a book.
There was a third character that
I had to come to grips with.
And that was the
analytical engine.
The analytical engine-- and in
the comic appears like this.
This is George Eliot getting
her novel spell checked.
She gets lost and almost eaten.
But in the comic, the machine--
like the way it's
actually described
by contemporary people, and
even by Babbage, and even
by Lovelace-- you just
get this impression
of this enormous bunch
of cogs doing something.
And it's very complicated.
And you can't understand it.
But because I had so
much primary stuff
about Babbage and Lovelace,
I felt I had to have--
now here's the real
analytical engine.
So I sat down to
do a visualization.
And I was very upset to find
that no one had done one
that I could rip off.
All I had was the Babbage plan.
So this is plan 25.
This is a pretty famous image.
You might have seen it in
computer history books.
But actually, it's a lot more
ambiguous than it might seem.
These are the cards,
the famous punch cards.
But how are the attached?
And where do they go?
Are they up?
Or are they down?
Are they to scale?
Babbage left not a
lot of elevations,
which makes it hard to
understand the machine.
So I had to sit down
with these plans.
And I have to say, I also
used the scholarly work
of Allen Bromley, the
late Allen Bromley,
who really went
through and explained
the mathematics of the
machine with extreme detail.
So between the Bromley
papers and the diagrams,
I was able to do
some elevations.
Come on.
There we go.
That's to scale.
It's a really big machine--
to get a sense of the
reality of this thing.
And using that, I
was able to produce
this, which was the first
visualization, to my knowledge,
of the machine.
It should be fairly
accurate-ish.
I have a feeling it couldn't
have been freestanding
like this just because of the
sheer weight of the thing.
I think it would probably have
to be in one of those warehouse
buildings, basically embedded
into the structure of a pretty
heavy, hefty building.
But I'll go over
how this machine
works, because that's my purpose
for being here, I suppose.
So this is the store, which
is the memory, basically.
It's a lot easier to describe
this machine in Maya, actually.
So I'm gonna switch over.
Babbage himself said that one of
the reasons he didn't describe
his machine very
much was because it's
very difficult to
explain how it works
without being able to show it.
And boy, is he ever right.
Because I find it impossible
to explain without--
and I found it actually
impossible to understand
without basically building
it and animating it.
But that wound up being a
really, really good tool.
So this is just a slice of it.
To see how the whole
thing looks, turn on--
here's my naming
convention, whole thing.
OK, there we go.
So come on.
As you can-- you can see
why I'm only using a slice.
My laptop is pretty
strong but it's really
struggling with the--
come on.
There we go.
Eeee.
Eeee.
There we go.
OK.
There we go.
So what you're
looking at here is
a machine for manipulating
very large numbers.
That's what Babbage
designed it for.
And every single
piece of the machine
is to add, subtract,
multiply, divide large numbers
as quickly as possible.
The machine was not designed
to produce a single result.
It was designed to run through
iterations of a formula
to print out into books.
So basically, what
you would have is
we need x formula
for life insurance.
What are the premiums if
you're such and such an age?
And it would just run down and
print for each successive age
what the statistics are.
That's the sort of thing
this machine was for.
Each of these
columns is a number.
Babbage specified 50 digits
for his ideal machine.
So these are 50 gears.
And the way you store a number
is you just turn each gear.
So if you want to put 351,
you go three, five, one places
on each gear.
And you just go down.
Even I can understand that part.
So it's pretty straightforward.
As to how much storage he had,
everyone wants more memory.
I think Babbage said
ideally 1,000 places.
You can see, if I pop
back to the design,
he puts the memory
running off the page.
So I'm sure he would
have ideally added
more and more memory to that.
And the memory just goes
off into the distance.
So if I turn that off--
so each layer, all that
height is only because it's
such big numbers that it's for.
So the mass of the
machinery is just
replicating the decimal places.
So this is just a very super,
super, super simplified
demo with one--
[INAUDIBLE] quality
here-- with one decimal
place just to go through
this amazing machine.
Because it's an absolute
thing of beauty.
And when you consider this was
designed in the 1830s and '40s
by a guy with literally a
feather and some candles,
it's pretty amazing because
this was all held in his head.
It took three types of
card to run the machine--
number card, variable card--
this is the addressing system,
basically--
and the operations card,
which has the program itself.
Fortunately, very recently,
I had some lovely pictures
sent to me by Bruce Sterling,
actually, who's in Turin
and found some of the
stuff that Babbage left
when he gave his talk there.
This is the number card
sample that he left.
So this is pi written
on the number card.
And you can see the
way the card is written
is that the important
places-- so three
has three unpunched holes.
Here's an operations card.
Come back to that in a sec.
But if you look at the--
if you go back to
the number card,
the whole machine was
built off of the principle
of the Jacquard loom.
If you ever see one of those,
all that happens with the loom
is that you have--
go to the number
cards over here.
So you'd have an array.
On a number card, you'd
have 10 little levers
for 50 decimal places.
It's like 500 little levers.
This is actually not 500.
I didn't go that crazy with it.
But it would have been an
extremely complicated machine.
And the way it
works is the spindle
pushes the card forward.
If there is a hole, it just goes
through the lever and nothing
happens.
If there's not a
hole, then the lever
pushes forward and
basically engages some part
of the machine to the power.
Underneath the machine are
cams continually turning,
driven, presumably, by
the steam engine that's
puffing away in the corner.
And the lever will just hook
up something to the cam.
And it will go either up
and down or round and round.
That's basically the two
things that cams can do.
But if you put them
together in clever ways,
you can do some
pretty good stuff.
So that's how the cards work.
The way the machine works is
the first thing that happens
is the variable card, which I
always call them address cards
just because it's
a lot clearer to me
to think of this as
the addressing system.
And this would have
a hole, I presume,
for each position in the memory.
So you would eventually
have a ginormous card,
unless you came up with
some more clever system.
And that just depresses
a lever, which
hooks up its corresponding
section in the memory
to a little pinion.
Then the number card--
red means it's driving.
Green means it's being driven.
It's just a bit clearer
to understand that way.
So then the number card
will read just by turning--
all it does is just
say turn three places.
Turn however many places there
are no holes in this section.
So that turns three
places, so three.
The rack goes three places,
pinion goes three places,
gear goes three places.
It's now reading three.
Disengage.
So then it reads
in another number.
Variable card
selects the address.
Number card reads
out a number into it.
These cards are run
completely separately.
So when you are
setting up the program,
you're wrangling three
completely separate cards.
And you really better
hope that you've
got them in the right order.
Otherwise, you'll
get those pop-ups.
Now, the operations
card is, to me,
where the real beauty
of the machine is.
Let's go pop over to the
operations card here.
Hmm.
There we go.
You can see here, this is
Babbage's own handwriting.
He has all the functions-- add,
subtract, multiply, divide.
This is demonstrating
a division.
It's always got these two
holes-- add rotation, subtract
rotation.
That means the
machine could instruct
itself to go back or
forward, depending
on the state of the machine.
And I'll explain how
that works in a sec.
So how could you go through
such a complex procedure
with a single hole?
Because addition alone
took several dozen steps
of many, many different
bits of machinery, the way
he did that is with the
barrels, which is funny
because he actually took
these from the barrel organs
that he hated so much.
But he must have
loved that mechanism
because he stuck these
barrels all over the place.
And the way that he uses them
is that the operations card will
say, add, let's say.
Push forward, and
then the barrels
will rotate to a
wedge of instructions.
So all that the
add position does
is say, go to the add
set of instructions.
And once that's
set up, the numbers
are then ordered from
the variable card.
The variable card hooks up.
It's got its own barrel.
Any of the cards
are using barrels
because they need to run
through a bunch of stuff.
And that reads off
their designated address
into the ingress axis,
which then reads it off
into these wonderful wheels.
I love these things.
He got rid of these
in the later designs
for the machine, which is sad.
Because I love the
clarity of this giant data
transfer thing in the middle.
So this would send the
number to this section.
Each of these sections
in the middle--
pop back to look at the--
so each of these sections
is specialized gearing.
And it's largely
adding stuff, but just
special types of addition.
And it just says, OK, go
to the adding section.
So it feeds the one number
in, picks up another number,
feeds that one in.
And then the barrels just go
through their little routine.
This, obviously, is a cartoon.
These are really, really
complicated bits of gear.
But I just put this together
for my own illustration.
So they run through
their instruction set.
There's the result.
The variable cards
select the address that they
want the result to read out to.
So that's fed into the
egress access, or output
I guess we call it now.
Variable cards
pick up, give where
they want that to read to.
And that reads off.
And done.
Ada had a very--
although she's known generally
as the first programmer,
that's not actually, first of
all, true, or second of all,
that critical.
Obviously, Babbage wrote
programs for the machine
when he was designing it.
They're much simpler
than that Bernoulli
one, which he and
Ada collaborated on,
which is in the paper.
But Babbage also
had assistants that
might have written some
simple programs for it.
So she wasn't the first.
And she wasn't there at his
elbow writing programs for him.
In any case, she
herself complained a lot
about those state tables.
When she wrote the paper, she
was like, this is a huge pain
and it's really
annoying and fiddly.
And this is an [INAUDIBLE].
What Ada's actual main
interest in the machine
was in connecting it with
the ideas of this guy, who
was her mathematics tutor,
who's Augustus De Morgan.
If you've heard of De Morgan's
laws, this is that De Morgan.
De Morgan basically took Ada
through his University College
London course, which
he had just started.
Obviously, as a woman,
she couldn't go.
But he took her through
it by correspondence.
He was a family friend,
not someone they paid
or anything like that.
They hung out, I
guess you could say.
And at the same time that
Lovelace was hanging out
with Babbage, she
was also hanging out
with De Morgan at the time
that De Morgan was developing
a mathematical system of logic.
This is 10 years before Boole.
You can see what De Morgan's
logic looks like here.
He's trying to find
a way to turn it
into mathematical formulas.
And for Lovelace,
she looked at this--
I think for Lovelace, being
in proximity with these two
ideas in ferment--
Babbage's machine for
manipulating numbers
and De Morgan's concept
of logic as mathematics,
which was very, very, very new.
I mean, De Morgan was
really pretty much
one of the first people who
was doing this sort of thing.
This kind of led her--
I'll pop past that.
This led to probably
her most famous passage
in the paper, which is
to link the two together
and say this is not necessarily
an arithmetic machine.
This can be a logic machine.
She says, "Holds
a position wholly
its own, enabling mechanism
to combine together
general symbols--"
she's Victorian,
so it takes a long time to
get through a sentence--
"in successions of unlimited
variety and extent,
a uniting link is established
between the operations
of matter and the
abstract mental processes
of the most abstract branch
of mathematical science.
A new vast and
powerful language is
developed for the
future use of analysis."
She comes back to this
idea again and again
in the paper that,
for example, she says,
if you took musical composition
and could find a way
to develop it as a
series of instructions,
the machine could be
taught to compose music--
scientific music, she says.
It could be time to
compose scientific music
of unlimited variety and extent.
So for me looking at this--
sorry, this is my Ada
Lovelace programming engine.
I'm always struck by how
hard it must have been
to keep the cards together.
So I've designed for her
a machine to do that.
For me, too, it was only
when I built this thing
that I understood what a
spectacular leap this was.
There's nothing in this
machine that would even
suggest such a thing to me.
To me, and certainly
to Babbage, this
is a machine for arithmetic--
fast arithmetic in
very large numbers.
And Babbage's
obsession with speed
is, I guess, a
classic hardware guy,
from what I understand
it, in that most
of the work that he put into
it was to make it faster.
But Lovelace saw the connection
with logic with this little bit
here.
And that's the add rotation,
subtract rotation instruction
on those cards.
Babbage developed for
that this little thing
called the conditional arm.
And that would drop down
when the machine hit,
say, a certain result or
a certain level of result,
that it would then instruct
the machine to stop,
for example, or branch--
to go to a different
set of instructions.
Where's the animation to that?
There we go.
So while the barrels
are going away,
you can see if there is a
peg and the arm is in place,
then it instructs the machine
to do something different.
And this is a logic.
This is an if/and logic system.
And it's this tiny
piece here, I think,
that Ada saw the
possibilities of.
If you stripped
away all the gears--
which 90% of the machine
is just numbers--
if you take that all away
and you just look at this,
and you start thinking
what you can do with that,
it's pretty
beautiful, even to me,
who hates computers,
just to remind you.
So that's the barrels
and the engine
and Ada Lovelace
and Charles Babbage
and logic and everything.
So I think that's my talk.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
