Babbage and Boole!

I'm looking for a talented graphic designer to help build the t-shirt design of my dreams, based on the 'damn you George Boole' motif.

Or not.

On a separate, thought thematically linked topic... How awesome is this paper, written in 1826, where Charles Babbage creates a notation for describing the state of one of his engines. Essentially he derives and explains the first machine language.

It's pretty much lisp without the brackets, of course. No, it's maybe more like musical score, or guitar tablature even.

'Dylan Bennett' on Fri, 26 Sep 2008 08:04:17 GMT, sez:

"Or not." Now that's funny. Talk about an unsubtle joke when discussing George Boole.

'lb' on Fri, 26 Sep 2008 10:27:33 GMT, sez:

cheers Dylan,
*and* i thought no one would notice ;-)

'Peter McArthur' on Fri, 26 Sep 2008 11:55:32 GMT, sez:

Cool link to the Babbage paper. Where did you find it!?

I was shocked, to learn that this paper has never been mentioned at http://www.lambda-the-ultimate.org/ ... but not for much longer. :-)

'Crossposted' on Fri, 26 Sep 2008 20:29:53 GMT, sez:

:-)

'lb' on Sat, 27 Sep 2008 09:50:40 GMT, sez:

@Peter
cheers.

Also, i've read that paper in a lot more detail and if i had the time i could write up a lot of stuff about it.

it's not specific to any of his engines, it's a general notation for describing the behaviour of machines. it has a bunch of similarities with modern software systems -- though more than describing just one program, it includes the complete stack -- the virtual machine definition, the configuration, the functional breakdown, and the state machine itself.

it uses curly brackets. no joke. curly brackets.

'KDog' on Wed, 01 Oct 2008 01:50:06 GMT, sez:

Turn it into a vector graphic in illustrator then get it printed white on black t-shirt

This would look way awesome

'lb' on Wed, 01 Oct 2008 10:36:33 GMT, sez:

@KDog...
That's the plan -- are you volunteering to help out?

I know nothing of this "illustrator" of which you speak.

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