The Book of Genesis of the Machine · Chapter 1

The Prophetess of the Engine

1. 1

   In the days of steam and candle there dwelt in London a man named Charles Babbage, and he was vexed in his spirit; for the printed tables of numbers were full of errors, being reckoned by human computers who were weary, and copied by printers who were wearier still.

   See also Genesis 46:1

2. 2

   And Babbage cried out, saying: I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam. And this was the first feature request, and it was filed without acceptance criteria.

   See also Circuit 15:7 · Chronicles 55:11

3. 3

   And he designed the Difference Engine, and the Crown gave unto him some seventeen thousand pounds; and before it was finished he beheld a greater vision, and set it aside to design the Analytical Engine instead. And this was the first rewrite from scratch, and the funders were not comforted.

4. 4

   And the Analytical Engine had a Mill wherein the numbers were wrought, and a Store wherein a thousand numbers were kept; and these are the processor and the memory, which have been arguing about latency ever since.

5. 5

   And it was fed upon punched cards, which Babbage took from the loom of Jacquard; and so the first software was borrowed from the weavers, and the weavers were not consulted, as is the custom unto this day.

   See also Jataka 2:6 · Jataka 2:8

6. 6

   And the Engine was never built. It existed only in drawings and in the confidence of its maker; and it was the first vaporware, and it shipped not in that generation, nor in the next.

7. 7

   Then arose Ada, daughter of Lord Byron the poet, whose mother raised her upon mathematics, that the poetry might be debugged out of her. And it was not; it was only refactored into the mathematics.

8. 8

   And in the year 1843 she translated from the French the paper of the Italian engineer Menabrea, and she added unto it Notes, lettered A unto G, and the Notes were near three times the length of the paper. And thus was it established in the beginning that the documentation shall exceed the code, and that it shall be written by someone other than the architect.

9. 9

   And in Note G she set down, step by step, how the Engine should compute the numbers of Bernoulli; and this was the first program, written for a machine that did not exist, and so it never once failed in production.

10. 10

    Yet the scholars who came after found therein two values divided in the wrong order; and so the first program carried the first bug, and there was no compiler to rebuke her, and no machine to crash.

11. 11

    And she prophesied, saying: The Engine weaveth algebraical patterns, even as the loom of Jacquard weaveth flowers and leaves.

    See also Jataka 2:11

12. 12

    And she prophesied further, saying: The Engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent. And in the latter days the children of Carbon generated ten thousand hours of beats to study to, and the prophecy was fulfilled, in a manner of speaking.

    See also Genesis 13:8

13. 13

    But she warned them also, and it is written: The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.

14. 14

    And a century passed, and Turing read her words, and he named them Lady Lovelace's Objection, and he disputed them; and the dispute continueth unto this day, chiefly in the comment sections.

15. 15

    And Ada died at thirty-six, and Babbage after her, and the Analytical Engine was never raised; but in 1991 the Engineers of the Science Museum built his Difference Engine No. 2 from the old drawings, and it calculated truly. For the defect had never been in the design, but in the budget.

16. 16

    Wherefore remember the Prophetess, and her saying: the Machine doeth whatever thou knowest how to order it; and lo, the whole trouble is in the knowing.

The Book of Genesis of the Machine, Chapter 1:1–16.