The Melbourne Athenaeum Library

The thrilling adventures of Lovelace and Babbage :

Padua, Sydney,

The thrilling adventures of Lovelace and Babbage : with interesting & curious anecdotes of celebrated and distinguished characters fully illustrating a variety of instructive and amusing scenes; as performed within and without the remarkable difference engine / Sydney Padua. - First edition. - New York : Pantheon Books, 2015. - 315 pages : chiefly illustrations ; 26 cm.

"The (mostly) true story of the first computer"--Jacket.

Ada Lovelace: The secret origin! -- The pocket universe -- The person from Porlock -- Lovelace & Babbage vs. the client! -- Primary sources -- Lovelace and Babbage vs. the economic model! -- Luddites! -- User experience! -- Mr. Boole comes to tea -- Imaginary quantities -- Appendix I: Some amusing primary documents -- Appendix II: The analytical engine.

Meet Victorian London's most dynamic duo: Charles Babbage, the unrealized inventor of the computer, and his accomplice, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, the peculiar protoprogrammer and daughter of Lord Byron. When Lovelace translated a description of Babbage's plans for an enormous mechanical calculating machine in 1842, she added annotations three times longer than the original work. Her footnotes contained the first appearance of the general computing theory, a hundred years before an actual computer was built. Sadly, Lovelace died of cancer a decade after publishing the paper, and Babbage never built any of his machines. But do not despair! The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage presents a rollicking alternate reality in which Lovelace and Babbage do build the Difference Engine and then use it to build runaway economic models, battle the scourge of spelling errors, explore the wilder realms of mathematics, and, of course, fight crime -- for the sake of both London and science. Complete with extensive footnotes that rival those penned by Lovelace herself, historical curiosities, and never-before-seen diagrams of Babbage's mechanical, steam-powered computer.

9780307908278 0307908275 (hard cover : alk. paper)

(YBP)12005232

2014004455


Lovelace, Ada King, Countess of, 1815-1852 --Fiction.
Babbage, Charles, 1791-1871 --Fiction.
Lovelace, Ada King, Countess of, 1815-1852 --Comic books, strips, etc.
Babbage, Charles, 1791-1871 --Comic books, strips, etc.


Computers.
Graphic novels.
Calculators--History--Great Britain--19th century--Comic books, strips, etc.
Mathematicians--Great Britain--Biography--Comic books, strips, etc.
Computers--History--Humor.
Imaginary histories.
Computers--History--Comic books, strips, etc.


Graphic novels
Graphic novels.
Graphic novels.
Historical fiction.
Humorous fiction.
Young adult fiction.
Comic books, strips, etc.
Graphic novels.
History.
Graphic novels
Graphic novels.

PN6737.P34 / T48 2015

741.5/942
Melbourne Athenaeum Library
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library@melbourneathenaeum.org.au
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