In my recent post about Ada Byron/Lovelace and Babbage’s machine, I used the term “retro-futurist” as I am not used to the more English “steam punk”:
Reading both Menabrea and Byron’s papers is fascinating. Imagine that Babbage had successfully build completely his Analytical Machine, one century before the World War 2. That thought is vain as it did not happened, but I can’t help thinking about it. How computer science would have developed? What impact would it had on the history of the 19th and 20th centuries? Probably I have already read some comic strips with such retro-futurist scenario, but it is fascinating to play with such an idea. Would a language similar to Fortran be born a hundred years sooner? The compiler would probably have been far too slow, as multiplying two numbers with 20 digits was expected to take three minutes with Babbage’s machine! But many technologies could have developed faster, for the better and the worse…
Babbage’s machine and FORTRAN have at least two things in common: being pioneering inventions and… punched cards!