A history of the thinking machine
Dr David Bell's book on the history of computing, in instalments — from Ada Lovelace's 1843 objection to today's large language models. Chapters and side essays.
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Read on SubstackDr David Bell is a Specialist Anaesthetist (Retired), software engineer, and author based in New South Wales, Australia. He practised as a consultant anaesthetist from 2018 to 2023 across major Sydney hospitals, covering cardiac, thoracic, neurosurgery, trauma, and obstetric cases. He holds a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS) and a Bachelor of Engineering in Software with First Class Honours, both from the University of Sydney.
Since retiring from clinical practice in 2023, David has focused on software engineering, AI in healthcare, and the history of computing. He is writing a book, Lady Lovelace's Objection, on the arc of computing from Babbage and Lovelace to the present, with a companion podcast, Lady Lovelace's Notebook. His 2018 analysis of private health insurance in Australia, published by the Sydney Morning Herald, remains one of the most widely shared healthcare opinion pieces in Australian media.
Chapter 2 of *Lady Lovelace's Objection* goes up on Substack today. It is the Boole and Shannon chapter, the one I knew I had to write before I had written a word of the rest of the book, because every other chapter in the first half of the book leans on it.
Read article →I bought a Halo Chlor 25 in early April. It is the salt chlorinator that sits at the centre of the AstralPool Halo Connect ecosystem, and most of an Australian pool's smarts run through it: the heat pump talks to it, the lights talk to it, the pH and ORP probes talk to it.
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An excerpt from Chapter 1 of Lady Lovelace's Objection, Dr David Bell's serialised history of computing. Babbage, Ada Lovelace, and the argument that began the modern computer.
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