[fentonc]

I've been very interested in mechanical computing for a while (even going so far as to build my own simple 3D-printed, hand-cranked computer!), but the whole analytical engine thing makes me wonder what might have happened if computing had developed more from the industrial-control / power-loom side of things rather than a need for scientific number crunching. A truly impressive amount of work was done by the mid-to-late 1800s with power looms - 'programs' 10s of thousands of cards long, speeds in excess of 3 Hz, 'production-level' reliability. The people building weaving mechanisms could have readily implemented something equivalent to a 4-bit microcontroller if they had been sufficiently motivated, which might have kicked off a computing revolution from the bottom up rather than starting with supercomputers and gradually figuring out how useful very limited microcontrollers were.