See a Need, Fill a Need!
~~~ At its best, building a small business is an ecstatic, intoxicating, and heady feeling of providing goods and services to underserved customers in underserved areas in underserved sectors, at its worst it can feel like being punished everywhere you turn for doing the right thing. Now that the Roxbury Home Store is making sales, I am struggling with bottlenecks in the supply chain forcing me to be extremely creative in order not to raise prices above what I consider things are worth - e.g. fair. I feel like I am bending over backwards so much I am turning into a praetzal ! (or a doormat ) - Case Studies : In February we sold an antique Japanese vase to a customer in California. The Vase cost me 5o cents at a garage sale, I sold it for 12.8o$ - I knew it could be worth several hundred dollars, perhaps more - but I considered a 2600% profit good enough for me - to rehome a beautiful item, while cultivating a reputation and customer base. 1o% of that was subtracted by Ebay for selling the item. 1o% donation was made I think to Habitat for Humanity in that case. and the remaining what - 1o dollars. well - derp di doo! Since day one of our 2o15 launch - We said we would not charge for shipping. (Which is a bit of a stretching of the truth, because you can say, "We do not charge for shipping" if you can incoporate the cost of shipping into the cost of the item) - Well, that would be wonderful if a 26oo% profit on 5o cents was enough to cover the cost of shipping and have a profit left over - NOPE. not in this world ! It cost me I think 12.5o to ship . so you could say The Home Store took in 3o cents of (net) profit - WOW! I am glad that my math was dun good enough that we made that much! Talk about flying by the seat of one's pants - wowie zowie ! ~~~ Now, we are selling herbs online - I grow mugwort in my personal garden, a hard to find , dern powerful herb that simply loves to grow where i live. and boy does it grow! even pruning it back to keep it from taking over provides a lot of material to work with - so what can I do with the fruits of my garden labors? offer this powerful herb throughout the world for lower prices than the competitors! YAHHHHSSSSS - not just to undercut their prices, but because as someone who buys herbs and other supplements on a monthly basis - I know how inflated prices of herbs can be, and often are! I am so grateful for our new customers, I am so grateful to be able to offer the fruits of my labors - plants from my own garden to people throughout the world who need and want them. I am so grateful for the support and Interest in this crazy dream of mine ! WOW. what a concept - to sell things for fair prices in an unfair world to awesome customers who are so trusting, and generous, and wonderful and supportive ! <3 you would think being a member of a coop would get you a deal on bulk herbs. WRONG. - no deals in the greenwashing of yupster land! even worse for small coops in rural places that are priced up the WAHZOO. "Yay! Take my Money!!!" ... being born in 1986, I look at this generous sized bundle of dried mugwort, and I think - what is this worth? what will the market hold? what is fair ? - well, I probably could sell this bundle for $4o, or rather grind it up into 4 oz packages and sell for $2o a piece (PLUS SHIPPING!) - and laugh all the way to the bank. and perhaps that is not bad. but I look at this neatly tied bundle in my hand, and I ask it : What do you think I should charge for you? to get the medicine from where it is plentiful to where it is needed and make it available to a larger clientale than yuppies and hipsters ? it says, 1o dollars and 8o cents. Okay - so it is online and BOOM. they are selling! yay Life goal achieved ! success. so now - how do I package and ship the bundle of mugwort in its current form ??? hrmmmm... I got it - cardboard poster tube inside a plastic envelope to catch any debris - BOOM! so there it is - what is the cardboard tube going to cost me - like $5 ? and shipping - le sigh. at least 6 or seven dollars - KODY! what are you doing to yourself??? you are horrible at this! - it is probably going to cost me 15$ -$2o to package and ship something that sold for $11 - NOOOOOOOO!!! but what do I do ? I can raise the price to $2o for a bundle ? but then I risk losing customers, and I think that that price is what we call INFLATED. $2o is a lot more than an easy $1o - why god why ? but if a customer purchases at least 3 bundles at a time - the roxbury home store wins! why! because the profit outpaces the cost of packaging and shipping - because it fits in the same container and doesn't weigh as much - Yay! so that is the goal - but what if people buy 1oo bundles of Mugwort - separately ??? THE HORROR. so friends, this is (one of 1o,ooo reasons) why business is not for the faint of heart. I don't believe in operating on the Competitive plane (See Wallace Wattles, "The Science of Getting Rich") - but if I am going to be punished for charging what I consider fair prices by everyone else on the supply chain - what do I do? it will work out somehow, but as of this hour i have no idea how - Even more, I am so embarassed to admit what I bring in for all my efforts. i feel Nekkid! Doubly so when most businesses are lifting their customers by the seat of their pants, turning them upside down and shaking them until every last dime falls out of them. Same struggle with Atlas Landscaping and Handyman Service (although prices are better for that so far and always works out - again flying by the seat of my pants - everything compensates everything else on that Front - one job pays little, another pays over - so it averages and is mutually beneficial) --- Don't do to me what you did to America ! Yours, ~Kody J. Bosch The Roxbury Home Store Oroville, Washington STate, USoNiA Initial Stirrings : Boston, The Projects of Roxbury Mass, and Handshouse Studio : in 2oo9 as a student of the pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland Oregon, I attended Massachusetts College of Art on the AICAD Mobility Program, which enabled me to study at Massart with no variations to the tuition I was already paying. I'm afraid I am not known to be the most prepared person, and battling seasonal depression I hobbled into Boston (riding Amtrak across the country) with barely any money left. Compounded by the managers of the Fairmount Hotel Apartments of Portland Oregon scamming me out of the $9oo deposit that would have enabled me to secure housing ... well...that is a long story. but there were times in Boston, after I could no longer afford to stay in the hostel (which is wonderful by the way), that I literally slept in South Street station, sitting at a chair by the book stand...anyways, eventually the school realized my condition and helped me tremendously --- The first apartment i Stayed at, was the brand spanking new visiting artist's suite in the dormitory complex on the edge of Roxbury, Mass - which is its own city, but is more or less incorporated into the structure of Boston for some time. I wandered into Roxbury , at night to collect some money my mom and gramma sent me western union from a corner bodega, and quickly gathered what a seedy area it is. A few months passed, and after couch surfing with Massart Students, and numerous visits to apartments and rooms via craigslist ads, one lady called me back from Forest Hills, Boston - on the edge of Jamaica Plain. So i found myself elevated to an incredibly peaceful, quiet black neighborhood living on the middle floor of a triple decker. it was amazing! I am mostly a walker - so I would walk through Jamaica Plain to the School on Mass Ave, often - whether i had money for the orange line or not - which stopped a block away from my home, and passed through the great Jamaica plains projects into downtown. The projects, seedy bodegas, abandoned 19th century prussian breweries, gilded standpipes on every hill illiciting thoughts of Derry, and other factories, great beaux art churches completely abandoned. and the wonderful park that extended from Mission hill to my home more or less on a trail. I am from the left coast, a town called Bellingham and the projects were a new thing to me. By then, I had already been practically been adopted by a group of black workers from the food court at Massart, was living in neighborhood that was 99% black and just soaking it all in ! Later, I come to learn of Roxbury Puddingstone - an amazing conglomerate quarried in what was once a great industry for Roxbury, a beautiful stone not found anywhere on earth, and from which many 19th and early 2oth century buildings of Jamaica Plain, Roxbury, and greater Boston were / are fashioned. Not yet having discovered Ralph Waldo Emerson, a planet in my cosmology at this point - I did learn that he preached at the Unitarian Church in Roxbury before he left for Concord. ~~~ Just past a great palace of an abandoned brewery, on the back side of Mission Hill, where the orange line parkway began - on the edge of a generic project, predominantly housing poor black folks, was a basketball court that was night, and day crowded with locals playing basketball, listening to music, dancing, putting on makeup, flirting, sitting for a rest, etc etc - it was a great ebony ocean and I stood out like a white bowling pin. I always thought it was amazing that even though people were living in such wretched conditions, in these deplorable soul-less buildings that they still had this tight knit community. The Generic institution buildings, reading all over as an after thought - were punctuated by one drab building being right next to one or two of the same building with boarded up graffitied windows, evil clematis and kudzu vines and gaping black fenestrations like eyeless sockets or toothless mouths - More or less disenfranchised from the American Dream, they somehow transcended it - after their own fashion. After a couple months of walking past that basketball court and sometimes smiling and waving, but mostly keeping to myself and letting the locals do their thing - i came upon the court one night to find a police line, and flashing lights, wailing locals, I knew something absolutely terrible had happened. and I made a wide berth as I knew that there was nothing i could do at the time, and I would check back later. I knew that the gang activity coincided with the community activities, and I saw that especially the young black men straddling this tightrope between falling in with the gangs and making their own way in the world. It was horrifying and deeply painful (even now) to find that what had happened on the basketball court was a young man of 9 years old was murdered in gun violence. After that, the court became a shrine to yet another martyred black man, with flowers, pictures, forlorn cards, photographs and private eulogies full of yearning. But the community was gone. the rest of the time i was in Boston. even though I still walked through that court at least twice every day (after a little bit of time of wariness) - no more was the community. I was the only one who now walked the court where only a moment previous was a thriving community in this little square or park. ~~~ 2o1o : The outside of prospectus Roxbury Annex I - or "The Apiary" in downtown Hillsboro, less than 1 block from the Max Station! It was zoned live work, and would have been leased for about $12oo a month ! I was negotiating with the realtors who were the best friends and patrons who artists could have - to have a shower installed, and a stainless steels ink with 3 tubs, along with a janitors sink as part of negotiations, before the train station back in Custer, Washington became available now, rather than a few more months down the road... About that time, or some time later - I spent a weekend in Norwell Massachusetts, with the architecture and sculpture departments of Massart, along with Bellingham Timber Framer's Guild - constructing a replica of the belltower from the Gwozdziec Synagogue in Poland - destroyed during the nazi genocide in Poland, along with most other wooden synagogues - We built the belltower, from hewing the logs, to casting the bell in iron from a 2oo year old century bell mold - in just less than a weekend! we sat under poplar trees at shingle horses hewing cedar shakes into finished shingles for the belltower, there was a swing on a branch over the tree next to an ancient new england stone wall. this was at the now world renown Handshouse Studio - which folds into Massart. We ate great meals, I slept below the table saw in the studio building, amazing conversations, jumping blind mostly naked into the river at dawn with friends, chasing each other through the woods in the dark scaling the stone walls and laughing till we almost burst, all the models from past Handshouse projects - including the actual Turtle Submarine and miniature models of the medieval cathedral cranes - That weekend was one of the most profound, ecstatic, fulfilling, exciting, rewarding, passionate weekends of my life ! - - - And when I got back to Boston, I was so High on the whole thing I started thinking about how to take tragic things and make them into something new. breathe new life, transposition - upcycling if you will - I knew I wanted to create something like Handshouse Studio, a community of makers working and playing hard - head, hands, and heart ! The idea, since then has been my all consuming obsession. I thought of the Pogroms in Poland and the disenfranchisement of black america, I thought of my own struggles with Homelessness - ~~~ Well, everyone knows what happened next was I got sick with Lyme's and nearly died - spending 3 days in Brigham and Women's hospital on cardiac monitoring, with spinal meningitis, athritis, damage to the pacemaker nerve of my heart, and covered with the Erythema migrans (target) rash over my entire body even to the whites of my eyes and under my finger nails! so, I survived - barely, and quickly packed up my room in Forest Hills in order to catch a plane from Newark back to Seattle and then to recuperate with my family for the summer - what began then is about a decade or so with the 2 steps forward 1 step back process of learning to live (and transcend!) an autoimmune disease. The first thing you think of when you almost die 3ooo miles away from home , alone and surrounded by doctors is that all you want to do is be with your family. so when I survived, I canceled my plans to travel to Provincetown and New York City and went straight back Home to Whatcom County, Washington State - So that acorn of an idea - for a community, of makers in collaborative efforts to make things to make the world a better place, gestated in the fertile soil of my mind for some time, after a summer in Whatcom County I was back in Oregon - moved around a bit. Steph Gorkii, Elbert Hubbard, The Notebook, and Roycroft Once back in Orygon, i would wax poetic about this vision endlessly, to all my friends and loved ones whether they liked it or not. hanging out with My friend Stephen Gorkii (with whom i had started a shop called "General Store of Thae Arts" in Edison washington in 2oo5 with another business partner) - in Gresham , he thought that my idea sounded similar to a man named Elbert Hubbard, and the Roycroft Arts and Crafts Community of Aurora New York - he lent me an old green tome called "The Notebook of Elbert Hubbard." Boom! it was like the scales fell from my eyes! I have read the book since dozens of times and it still continues to profoundly change my life and widen my horizons. with the idea of Roxbury in Mind, and the Name Roycroft - Roxbury seemed a perfect fit to the community. But how to generate the capital to build the community ? Well, having been raised on a farm with my maternal grandparents, in Custer Washington where my gramma has sold antiques for 5o years from her business called, "Dakota Creek Collectibles." - and having had a shop of my own with Stephen and Joey in Edison, and being a merchant something I am extremely good at and at least find infinitely pleasurable and rewarding - that's when the idea of The Roxbury Home Store was hatched ! - as the "Finishing Rooms" of "Roxbury Live Work Research Community for the Advancement of Thae Living arts and Sciences for the Betterment of World kind." Living in Forest Grove, and in artistic foment with my adventures with Stephen, i found a space in Hillsboro, right on the max line for lease - and what's more it was zoned live work ! WOW! so I was gunning for that at some time, oscillating wildly in my lyme's and bipolar symptoms - but negotiations were on - not only for a space to lease, but an old gas station (From the 192os) with an attached residence in Banks, Oregon to buy! - (no picture to be found at the moment! i wonder if the building survived the wrecking ball, it was a perfect little place!) then... On a routine twice yearly visit back to Whatcom county to see family, I discovered that the old train station in my hometown of Custer, a couple of miles from the family farme - was for lease, and not just that - but for $6oo a month for the whole thing as compared to $15oo a month or so just for rent for the hillsboro space (To be called, "The Apiary," Roxbury Annex I) - my living conditions in Forest Grove unstable, and faced with the possibility of getting into bricks and mortar space for a few hundred dollars today rather than a few thousand dollars a few months down the road - I jumped at the chance and decided to move back to my Home State of Washington. The Custer Home Store at Roxbury Annex I was Born! 2o13 : Roxbury Annex I - in Custer Washington, we leased 3/4 of the building which had a built in greenhouse, parking, huge store, art-design-invention studio, my own private apartment and offices, all for $6oo a month ! - adjacent to us was a video rental, thrift shop, and electronic repair shop and electronic recyclery. which was pretty cool ! for the first year, my maternal gramma and I were business partners on the shop. as she has sold antiques and thrift items for 5o years , through her business Dakota Creek Collectibles - Sagittarians and Pisces (me) are a volatile team - but it was a beautiful time in our lives. and also proved the viability of the Custer / Roxbury Home Store as a business model - we were making $$$ in the last few months ! - Lots has been said about The Custer Home Store, and Roxbury Annex I - thankfully, we were not faced with the initial daunting problems of high overhead (real estate) - what we did have was druggie neighbors, hostile shop owners who rented in the same building, and obstinate landlords who would not make the improvements to the infrastructure necessary to disentangle utility cost disagreements (installing 3 separate meters for essentially 3 different groups of tenants rather than trying to get stingy unreasonable people to be reasonable when faced with a collective $8oo a month power bill) I held out as long as I could - unfortunately that was just past the point where were making good money and selling everything we had - for whatever we asked (See also : Critical Mass) - but the problems of break ins, local druggies, irate neighbors and difficult landlords, conspired to break my health to the point where i knew I had to let it go - as it would kill me if I tried to hang onto it any longer. What followed was a disillusioned period where I unloaded all my possession, other than what could fit into a backpack (The MLU or Mobile LIving Unit) and set out to travel across the country by train, bus, walking, and hitch-hiking - urban kamping, couch surfing, and staying in hostels to do what I thought to be "Taking the temperature of the Union." - armed with a camera I saw myself as a self styled photo journalist on the "Mahayana Love Boat Tour Quest" - which lasted about a year - taking me from bellingham, to portland, ashland, san francisco, marin county, back to molson and then back to Bellingham where the "Xanadu" chapter of my life began ... Much of the mahayana love boat tour quest is documented on our domain for Atlas Design Co, the Rx~Press blog section - as that was my primary creative outlet during that period. :::On The Road Less Taken More, past where the Sidewalk Ends :The Mahayana Love Boat Tour Quest, our Real Estate Overlords, The Great Housing Crisis and the Birth of The Roxbury Home Store Aethernet Storefront::: ~~~ While still in Molson, in the summer of 2o14 i began using weebly to build a version of The Roxbury Home Store online - which is the site where you are gladly visiting today. It wasn't till about spring of 2o15 where the site finally launched. along with some of my friend's chocolates, and items for another friend who is a Nikken Distributor, and even items from consignment of the Spark Museum of Electricity ~~~ For about 5 years I worked on the store intermittently, with alacrity and burdened by excruciating pain of wondering if the store would ever make a sale, and haunted by my past successes of being able to practically sell ice to people in Iceland -!- Finally last February, after 6 years of grueling labor - the Roxbury Home Store Aethernet Store front made its first sale of an antique japanese vase ~~~ And that brings us to the present, where we are today ! I hope that you enjoyed this origin story of one of my businesses. I have been in Oroville, Washington State for the past two years now - forced out of Bellingham due to housing costs inflating out of control, intersecting with the Opioid epidemic and third world conditions of living in American Cities. My life has never been this secure, stable, comfortable - I intent to keep it that way and build on that ! my base kamp is finally good, and the Roxbury Home Store is taking wing! FINALLY! - my life may not be the community of 5oo - 1ooo makers on 5ooo acres of land I once envisioned - but We are doing Good, for our part - with 1o% of our gross profits (From all 3 of my businesses) going to seed fund philanthropy and all that - In some ways, I think I am much more useful as a free agent than as some Elbert Hubbard Industrialist-Cult Leader (I do not think of ElBert hubbard, my greatest hero in these terms) - I am free in My Architecture Cult of One - free to surf my own Inner Cosmic Ocean, without any artificial or arbitrary limits placed upon who I am - and that is pretty cool place to be ! Just to make shit that makes the world a better place, and sell a little bit to help raise the tides that raise all boats ! I hope you enjoyed this account, origin story of Rx~Home as much as I enjoyed Living it. Yours For The Revolution, ~Kody J. Bosch The Roxbury Home Store The Atlas Group Oroville, Washington State. USoNIA Change is Constant. but Change without Growth is Dissoulution and Death. -Kody J. Bosch I have found in my life a distinct cycle - I don't have a community, then I do have a community - which helps me to grow and learn and experience and ultimately comes a point where I have to decide to slowly decompose, or react against that community and its members. Almost instinctively, or unconsciously, I eject formerly treasured people out of my life, or they do the same to me.
Whether by outright malice, altercations, blowups, or even worse slowly ghosting, indifference - fading into the background as they become less and less capable of relating to you, or lose interest in even trying - I have found that people have an interest in you staying the same. in Not Growing. If you are a growing, doing - evolving person. as I believe we are meant to be - you hit a glass ceiling at the limits of the altitude of your group of People. So you go through life not really having people. Lonely times punctuated by occasional community until you outgrow that group and it starts over again. I don't imagine that these types of individuals will ever find their community, or people - on earth. A small handful you will journey with your entire life, and even if you outgrow them, or they outgrow you - both parties are confident enough in each other that this is not a threat. I suppose those are your people - trouble is you are often scattered about the earth ! - if you bridge all the miles and knock on their door, surely all will be well! Also, as a type A person - you initiate everything. and everyone gets used to you initiatiing everything. so what need is there to reach out ? The strong person, the person who is contributing the most Value to the world, its people - plants, and animals. are probably the lonlinest people you can find - until they discover a way to transpose their lonliness into a Joy of Solitude. I think that that comes more from converting into a human "Being" rather than a human "Doing." Get used to the discomfort! you either are miserable by betraying yourself into an arbitrarily small life being sucked into the morass of your Old Friends as they become normies, or slowly fall apart over many decades -or- you fly solo and intersect another flock - eventually they too will part. you have to learn to be okay with that. It will take you a few decades. But ultimately the highs are much higher, and the contentment is much more when you make the leap and build the airplane before you hit the ground - Everyone else is slowly decaying, and if they realize it - they are in denial - and it only exacerbates and accelerates their decline. Trees never stop growing! and we are walking trees! Nothing in nature ceases to expand, evolve, regenerate, metamorphosis, etc etc - it all has season and everything expands and creates greater and greater fruits - why are so many human beings afraid of change? Afraid of the growing pains? Afraid of alienating themselves in order to have a greater quality of life ? So I call it a Growth Gap - when you outpace your previous community, go through a dark knight, until suddenly the stretched rubber band launches you into the next Great Thing ~~~ Carry On Soldier! Keep on Keeping on ! Where Silence is a Trespass
For Molson By Kody John Bosch Where Silence is a Trespass The musical duress where the yellow fritillaria grows on rusty tailing piles where the bone dry, sun bleached building, leans minutely -further- every year - The End of the world. The End of The Road. The Quiet Refuge the howling wind. the golden wheat wind blown, swept over by Invisible Hand. Invisible forces well up - mighty in their way and our Tenuous Hold on The Land. Quietly Prevails. The Quiet Dignity stoic, heads held high the miles of barbed wire the open endless sky twisted in purpose the winding road, the Craggy Draw - Where even Silence is a trespass the groaning combine works on - the swayback horse the grange lights are on the Quiet yearning Desperation the Glacier Scoured Land - Begging the land to bear fruit, with gnarly , twisted hands - Behind, Resoulute The Plow. The Wind howls secrets through The Ponderosa Pine Trees. In Fortitude, we press on against Oblivion - Our Legacy, We hope to Hold - Against the Multitudes of nameless forgotten - The door latch, not shut - it bangs, wild, in the wind - the roof metal peels - even it protests its purpose - Quiet, in Infinite Dignity While Knuckled we Hold on In God's Sculpture Park - the Tails, like Flags of white tailed deer - in retreat, Signaling what ? There is no retreat, in this brutal land, We Press On. In infinite Dignity - the Silence we Loathe to Tread Upon.
Here at the Roxbury Home Store and Atlas Design Co we work hard to bring you quality designed, manufactured, highly original heirloom items to enrich your lives and those of your loved ones. Sometimes delivering a message , sometimes not, but always with Grace, Beauty, Panache and Smirk.
We hope you enjoy what we offer, any and all comments are definitely welcomed and encouraged. let us know what you would like to see, how we can improve our delivery system, and just say hello if you want ! <3 Much Love, Kody J. Bosch Atlas Design Co. The Roxbury Home Store Oroville, Washington, USA
P.S. Zazzle, the Company that manufactures and ships our merch type designs straight to you. Is a family owned, American Company out of San Jose , California. Most of their t-shirts are made by American Apparel, as per their partnership with them. We are Proud to provide American Made and Manufactured Products whenever whenever possible. :)
There was a time when the word "Computer" was a word which described someone who sat at a desk in an office and did endless calculations. These were logarithmic, trigometric, calculus works that were often involving things like Tide tables, weather patterns, ballistics, and astronomical data. These "Computers" painstakingly executed high level math operations which were then compiled into books that were published. The problem was that, even these highly skilled persons, were human. and inevitably would introduce errors into these calculations. which were endlessly iterated. and at a certain point an error would be written into a chart, and would basically make all the thousands of items that came after that error useless. like a 1% change in trajectory will put a rocket leaving earth past the side of the moon rather than landing on it. Or a sort of Christopher Columbus seeking India and ending up in The New World... Enter Mathematical + Mechanical Genius : Charles Babbage (26 December 1791 – 18 October 1871) Charles Babbage, mathematical (and later engineering) genius, was early employed in supervising the compiling of these tables and publishing them into books, asked himself if it were possible to make the process infinitely faster and error free by replacing human computers with a machine. Eureka! Exasperated by the sticky problem of calculating reliable tables, he approached the British government and secured a grant to build Difference Engine No. 1 - like many entrepreneurs , or other genius - Babbage had that "Reality Distortion Field." - though he was equal to the challenge, the limitations of precision of the day, lack of skilled labor and his own tendency to lose focus and follow down another rabbit trail just as he was nearing completion of a project (self sabotage?), led him to essentially design 3 machines in his life, having his friend and collaborator machinist Joseph Clement building portions of them, along with numerous prototypes. Difference Engine No.1 , Difference Engine No. 2, and The Analytical Engine. Difference Engines no. 1 and 2 had build in "Software" that is to say that the program to run the calculations was built into the brass wheels, cogs, gears, levers of the machine, which was hand cranked, and could not be changed. there was the ability to set the numbers via brass dials with inset numbers, but other than that the essential function of the machine could not be changed. later, Babbage abandoned the Difference Engine for an even greater Bonanza : the Analytical Engine - combining the punch cards of the Jacquard Loom and his Difference Engine - Babbage realized he could build a programmable computer - he , along with Ada Lovelace, pre-empted The Turing Universal Machine by nearly a century (Alan Turing proposed his "Universal Machine" in 1936) - realizing that a programmable mechanical "Computer" could be made to do more than just calculate tide tables, artillery trajectories, and so forth but they foresaw that it could be made to do almost anything... after spending 17,ooo pounds on Babbage's Machines, (equivalent to £2,301,445.79 -or- $3,113,384.36 today) The British government ultimately lost patience with Babbage's inability to bring the ship into port - to finish even one of his machines, over the decades that they were his patrons. This form of government patronage for the development of computer technology also set the pattern for computer technological development in the 2oth century. If Babbage had lived to see his Vision fully flushed out, we would have had Modern Programmable Computers Over a hundred years before The First computers like Konrad Zuse's, ENIAC, and others! - Lord Byron, Ada Lovelace, and The Origin of Computer Programmers : Every Genius needs a No. 1 Fan, and even better if that fan is also a genius and equally if not more capable. Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, and herself an accomplished mathematician and scientist was the best Friend and interpreter that Charles Babbage could ever have had. She translated Babbage's ideas into understandable concepts, softened his rough edges - as an intermediary between himself and the patronage he required. As well as peers and the general public. Widely considered the first computer Programmer, Lovelace designed Heuristics and Algorithms for Babbage's machines, did work on the punch card systems for The Analytical Engine, and wrote many treatises and articles about the machines which were disseminated widely. With Great Alacrity, and Magnanimity, she understood the earth shattering importance of Babbage's ideas - perhaps more than he did on some fronts. It is probably in large part due to her that we even remember Babbage, his megalithic project, and that he was able to get as close as he did to Advancing Computer Science over a hundred years. Imagine if we were 1oo years farther along in Computer technology today - One almost shudders to think. If Babbage had succeeded in finishing even one of his machines, that would likely be the case and we would be living in a world that looks much different than today, probably entirely different - for better or for Worse. “We may say most aptly, that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves." -Ada Lovelace- Ada Lovelace, (10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852) Mathematician, Daughter of Lord Byron, and long considered the First Computer Programmer was instrumental in being the buffer between a cantankerous, disagreeable and often self-sabotaging Charles Babbage the public, the Crown, and the patronage he needed to achieve his dreams. This Portion of Difference Engine No.1 was graciously put together from pieces gleaned from Babbage's workshop by his son after Babbage had passed away. Babbage and his machinist collaborator were pushing the technology as far as it could go at the time - this level of precision had never been required before. And one sees how the earlier models of section of the machine are heavier and clunkier, while they tend to become more graceful, refined, and less muscular with each iteration. Difference Engine No. 2 - completed by the workshop technicians of The British Museum - who have now made 2 of the machine. both of which, with little alteration work exactly as Babbage had intended them to. (one of the only changes was to make a gear ratio reducer so that 4 turns of the crank would complete 1 calculation -rather than 1 turn which would make the poor operator's arm fall off whoever had the biceps to turn thing Difference Engine No.2 was never completed during Babbage's life time. in the early 2ooos, an entrepreneur Commissioned the British Science Museum to construct a full version of the machine, for the very first time. it was constructed in the museum workshop over a period of several years and a project costing several million dollars. Ultimately, the builders of the machine, and the businessman who commissioned it himself had no idea if the machine would actually work. Much to everyone's surprise, an almost 2oo year old machine, with little changes from the original patents , functioned just as Babbage intended it to! Later a second machine was commissioned (intended for the businessman's living room!) which is on temporary loan to The Computer History Museum , Formerly in Boston, now in California where it is regularly demonstrated for museum visitors via a large hand crank visible to the left of back side of the machine - Bibliography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace One of my favorite website of all time, a Wealth of Information about Computer history, the incredible amount of information, lavishly illustrated on the usually unknown Difference Engines that came after and built upon babbages work alone is incredible. Spent countless hours on this wonderful site for almost half my life: https:///history-computer.com/ https://computerhistory.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Clement Pounds Inflation Calculator : https://www.in2013dollars.com/uk/inflation/1822?amount=17000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Turing_machine |
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November 2022
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