A demo of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine

Charles Babbage designed one of the first computers but never lived to see it built. Here’s a demo of one of the two in the world that work. This one is at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, USA, and here they fire it up (well, crank it up) and explain a bit about it. The folks standing around are pioneers too. They are people who built and used the Plato system (there was a conference going about Plato, which was a social media system used in the 1970s).