For all of the reasons that I dislike computers, such as the amount of time they suck out of my life, they really are niffty little things. I know that the Macintosh 128K was by no means the first programmable computer, but it is the familiar face I grew up with, so here it represents the those early dinosaurs. But even before these programmable computer machines, Charles Babbage created the "difference engine", and helped begin the computer age as early as the 1850s.
Babbage's difference engine, made use of automated computation to calculate large numbers very fast. Although by today many would consider Babbage's machine a calculator, how different is it really from the object you are sitting at right now to read these words? Sure it doesn't have the ease of input, available to you at your fingertips but it still has a certain awe-inspiring beauty to it.
In many ways the type of awe found in watching this machine work is the same sort of awe felt my many of the Romantic artists and writers as they went back to nature and began to experience it again, without the idea to conquer it.
Personally, I feel that each of us has a muse, something that will inspire us to our greatest heights. Whether it is the great outdoors, or the great internal workings of the Babbage machine, we should each find our passion, and maybe one day the world will remember us because of what we did. What are you going to do today?
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