Doron Swade

Charles Babbage's Difference Engine in the Science Museum (London), built on a project led by Doron Swade. Doron Swade MBE, born 1946, 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.

Life Swade is originally from South Africa. He has studied electronics engineering, history, machine intelligence, philosophy of science and physics at a number of universities including the University of Cape Town, University of Cambridge, and University College London (UCL). and the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, California, United States, where he worked on an exhibit on relational databases. 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 to organise the construction of 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.

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

Since 2010, Swade has been involved with the Plan 28 project to understand whether Babbage's Analytical Engine was a feasible computer based on Babbage's work, and to build a simulation.