The Difference Engine was there when I visited, last autumn... I don't know when I'll next be in California, but I just wanted to confirm, to anyone maybe thinking about going, that seeing it in operation was completely awesome. It felt like being an ape at the foot of the monolith in "2001".

(And when someone asked the operators how the eight coefficients of the polynomial to evaluate were themselves determined, the answer was "Not sure... probably they just found the first eight terms of the Taylor expansion" and everybody nodded sagely. That was when I knew I was amongst real geeks.)

Peter