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I've started the story "The Difference Engine" recently which takes place in an ATL where Charles Babbage was able to build his design of a clockwork computer called the Difference Engine in the 1840s. Due to this change various advances in science and changes in politics are made by 1855 when the book takes place that did not happen in OTL. One example is that Texas remains independent and Sam Houston is banished from it to Europe.
Now in OTL Babbage never completed his designs for his engines but still tried to finish the design for his Analytical engine until his death at 1871. The Analytical engine was supposedly even more capable than his Difference engine models and his son Henry Babbage continued trying to gain funding to build one after his fathers death.
So lets say that for some reason the Babbage’s are able to get more funding and by the time of Charles' death one is completed and the world learns of it capabilities. Like the world in the Difference Engine where the POD was in the 1840s what changes might occur within the scientific and political world of the 1870s and onwards due to creating an early "Information Era" at that time? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_Engine