I expect most people have heard of Charles Babbage who invented the first real computer, but didn't manage to actually build it. He was a genius, but had a lot of uncompleted projects. The British government gave him a small fortune to build a calculating machine to create accurate tables of logarithms that were needed for calculations, but he didn't deliver.
Artist and animator Sydney Padua (she's a female Sydney) is obviously obsessed with Babbage and Ada Lovelace who wrote about the calculating machines and came up with some early programs. She has done extensive research and come up with a great comic that tells their story, but they goes into a fantasy world where they did manage to build a mighty computer.
If the Victorians had had a computer then the world might be a different place, but this is more of a steampunk world rather than what could really have happened.
It's a really fun comic with lots of cool ideas. It's full of footnotes and endnotes that explain the source of many of the quotes and incidents. Some of the documents are replicated in the appendix along with an explanation of how the great analytical engine would have worked.
It's a fun read and you can see most of it on-line. I actually read it there first, but wanted to get the book anyway.
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