Charles Babbage's Difference Engine in the Science Museum (London), built on a project led by Doron Swade.

Doron Swade MBE is a museum curator and author, specialising in the history of computing. He is especially known for his work on the computer pioneer Charles Babbage and his Difference Engine.^[1]

Swade was originally from South Africa. He has studied electronics engineering, history, machine intelligence and philosophy of science, physics at a number of universities including the University of Cape Town, University of Cambridge, and University College London (UCL).^[2] He hold a BSc in physics and electronics engineering, an MSc in control engineering, and a PhD in the history of computing from UCL.

He has been a curator at the Science Museum in London, England,^[3] and the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, California, USA.^[2] At the Science Museum, he curated the computing and electronics collections and rose to be Assistant Director and Head of Collections. His major project at the museum was the organization of a project to reconstruct Charles Babbage's Difference Engine, in collaboration with Dr Allan Bromley, who studied Babbage's original drawings at the Science Museum.

In 1989, Swade was a co-founder of the Computer Conservation Society, a specialist group of the British Computer Society (BCS), with regular meetings at the Science Museum. He is a Fellow of the BCS and a Chartered Engineer.

Swade is a Visiting Professor in the History of Computing at the University of Portsmouth, UK.^[4] He is also an Honorary Research Fellow in Computer Science at Royal Holloway, University of London.^[2]

He appeared in the In Our Time program on Ada Lovelace, a collaborator with Charles Babbage, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2008.^[4]

Swade was awarded an MBE for services to the history of computing in the UK New Year Honours 2009 list.^[5]

[edit] Books

Swade has written the following books:^[6][7]

• The Dream Machine: Story of the Computer, 1991. BBC Books, 1993. With Jon Palfreman. ISBN 978-0563369929.
• Charles Babbage and his Calculating Engines, Science Museum, London, 1998. ISBN 978-0901805454.
• The Cogwheel Brain, Abacus, 2001. ISBN 978-0349112398.
• The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer, Penguin Putnam, 2001. ISBN 978-0670910205. Penguin Books, 2002. ISBN 978-0142001448.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Charles Babbage Expert Doron Swade on Simplicity, YouTube
• Authors@Google: Doron Swade, YouTube

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