Babbage

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.

The famous and prolific nineteenth-century mathematician, engineer and inventor Charles Babbage (1791-1871) was an early pioneer of computing. He planned several calculating machines, but none was built in his lifetime. On his death his youngest son, Henry P. Babbage, was charged with the task of completing an unfinished volume of papers on the machines, which was finally published in 1889 and is reissued here.

As a field, computer science occupies a unique scientific space, in that its subject matter can exist in both physical and abstract realms. An artifact such as software is both tangible and not, and must be classified as something in between, or "liminal." The study and production of liminal artifacts allows for creative possibilities that are, and have been, possible only in computer science.