The Difference Engine

Author: William Gibson
Publisher: Spectra
ISBN: 0345532589
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 514

Book Description
1855: The Industrial Revolution is in full and inexorable swing, powered by steam-driven cybernetic Engines. Charles Babbage perfects his Analytical Engine and the computer age arrives a century ahead of its time. And three extraordinary characters race toward a rendezvous with history—and the future: Sybil Gerard—a fallen woman, politician’s tart, daughter of a Luddite agitator Edward “Leviathan” Mallory—explorer and paleontologist Laurence Oliphant—diplomat, mystic, and spy. Their adventure begins with the discovery of a box of punched Engine cards of unknown origin and purpose. Cards someone wants badly enough to kill for…. Part detective story, part historical thriller, The Difference Engine is the collaborative masterpiece by two of the most acclaimed science fiction authors writing today. Provocative, compelling, intensely imagined, it is a startling extension of Gibson’s and Sterling’s unique visions—and the beginning of movement we know today as “steampunk!”

The Difference Engine

Author: Doron Swade
Publisher: Penguin Group
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 380

Book Description
"Drawing on previously unused archival material, The Difference Engine is a tale of both Babbage's nineteenth-century quest to build a calculating engine and its twentieth-century sequel. For in 1991, Babbage's vision was finally realized, at least in part, by the completion at the Science Museum in London of the first full-sized Babbage engine, finished in time for the 200th anniversary of Babbage's birth. The two quests are mutually illuminating and are recounted here by the then Curator of Computing, Doron Swade - one of the main protagonists of the successful resumption of Babbage's extraordinary work."--BOOK JACKET.

All Tomorrow's Parties

Author: William Gibson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101146486
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Book Description
“The ferociously talented Gibson delivers his signature mélange of technopop splendor and post-industrial squalor” (Time) in this New York Times bestseller that features his hero from Idoru... Colin Laney, sensitive to patterns of information like no one else on earth, currently resides in a cardboard box in Tokyo. His body shakes with fever dreams, but his mind roams free as always, and he knows something is about to happen. Not in Tokyo; he will not see this thing himself. Something is about to happen in San Francisco. The mists make it easy to hide, if hiding is what you want, and even at the best of times reality there seems to shift. A gray man moves elegantly through the mists, leaving bodies in his wake, so that a tide of absences alerts Laney to his presence. A boy named Silencio does not speak, but flies through webs of cyber-information in search of the one object that has seized his imagination. And Rei Toi, the Japanese Idoru, continues her study of all things human. She herself is not human, not quite, but she’s working on it. And in the mists of San Francisco, at this rare moment in history, who is to say what is or is not impossible...

The Makers Club

Author: Reimena Yee
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789811498671
Category : Creative ability
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description

Georg Scheutz and the First Printing Calculator

Author: Uta C. Merzbach
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 84

Book Description

Sound

Author: Various
Publisher: Difference Engine Pte Limited
ISBN: 9789811451607
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Traffic. A crunchy snack. An argument. What does sound look like to you? Difference Engine is proud to present our first comics anthology, SOUND: A Comics Anthology. Writers and illustrators from all around Southeast Asia were challenged to push the boundaries of depicting the unseen through the medium of visuals and words, while telling stories important to them. Guest editors Budjette Tan and Charis Loke have put together an intriguing list of stories that showcase the creativity of creators across Southeast Asia--both familiar and new names. In a broad range of genres and topics, this collection of stories is an exciting exploration of what the comics medium is capable of.

The Cogwheel Brain

Author: Doron Swade
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780349112398
Category : Calculators
Languages : en
Pages : 342

Book Description
In 1821, 30-year-old inventor and mathematician Charles Babbage was poring over a set of printed mathematical tables with his friend, the astronomer John Herschel. Finding error after error in the manually evaluated results, Babbage made an exclamation, the consequences of which would not only dominate the remaining 50 years of his life, but also lay the foundations for the modern computer industry: 'I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam!' A few days later, he set down a plan to build a machine that would carry out complex mathematical calculations without human intervention and, at least in theory, without human errors. The only technology to which he had access for solving the problem was the cogwheel escapement found inside clocks. Babbage saw that a machine constructed out of hundreds of escapements, cunningly and precisely linked, might be able to handle calculations mechanically. The story of his lifelong bid to construct such a machine is a triumph of human ingenuity, will and imagination.

The Difference Engine

Author: William Gibson
Publisher: Spectra
ISBN: 0307801276
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 445

Different Engines

Author: Mark Brake
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 0230553974
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 388

Book Description
Since its emergence in the seventeenth century, science fiction has been a sustained, coherent and subversive check on the promises and pitfalls of science. In their turn, invention and discovery have forced fiction writers to confront the nature and limits of reality. Different Engines explores how this fascinating symbiosis shapes what we see, do, and dream. From Johannes Kepler's Somnium to Arthur C. Clarke's 2001, science fiction has emerged as a mode of thinking, complementary to the scientific method. Science fiction's field of interest is the gap between the new worlds uncovered by experimentation and exploration, and the fantastic worlds of the imagination. Its proponents find drama in the tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Its readers, many of them scientists and politicians, find inspiration in the contrast between the ordinary and the extraordinary. Brake and Hook's Different Engines is a unique, provocative and compelling account of science fiction as the arbiter of progress.

Computer

Author: Martin Campbell-Kelly
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000878759
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 375

Book Description
This volume provides a history of the computer which now comes properly up to the ubiquitous age, with new chapters that look at globalization, platformitization and regulation, allowing readers to engage with the more recent takeover by computers in their historical perspective. With the growing ubiquity of computers, the subject is one of interest to many students and this will feature in history of science and technology courses, and world history courses as well as ones specifically on computing. Books on the history of computing tend to be quite technically or business focused, this covers the social and cultural history as well.