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Lot 75

LUDGATE, PERCY. 1883-1922.
"On a Proposed Analytical Machine." Offprint from: The Scientific Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. XII (N.S.), No. 9, April, 1909. Dublin: The Royal Dublin Society, 1909.

21 September 2015, 13:00 EDT
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LUDGATE, PERCY. 1883-1922.

"On a Proposed Analytical Machine." Offprint from: The Scientific Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society, Vol. XII (N.S.), No. 9, April, 1909. Dublin: The Royal Dublin Society, 1909.
8vo. 77-91 pp. Original blue printed wrappers, uncut and unopened. Wrappers lightly sunned at edges, otherwise an excellent copy. Old library stamp to front wrapper.

FIRST APPEARANCE, offprint issue, of Ludgate's calculating machine, developed independently of Babbage's design and today considered closer to the modern computer than Babbage's. Portable and based on multiplication rather than addition, Ludgate's engine could also be programmed and was "the result of about six years' work, undertaken ... with the object of designing machinery capable of performing calculations, however, intricate or laborious, without the immediate guidance of the human intellect" (p 77). The machine was never built, and sadly, Ludgate's original drawings of it have been lost. Rarely encountered as a separate offprint. Randell, Origins of Digital Computers (3d ed), pp 73-87 (reprinting this paper); 489. See Origins of Cyberspace, p 72.

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