Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine

1830 AD
Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine

As was previously noted, the first device that might be considered to be a computer in the modern sense of the word was conceived by the eccentric British mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage.
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In 1822, Babbage proposed building a machine called the Difference Engine to automatically calculate mathematical tables. The Difference Engine was only partially completed when Babbage conceived the idea of another, more sophisticated machine called an Analytical Engine. (Some texts refer to this machine as an "Analytical Steam Engine," because Babbage intended that it would be powered by steam).		Charles Babbage Copyright (c) 1997. Maxfield & Montrose Interactive Inc
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The Analytical Engine was intended to use loops of Jacquard's punched cards to control an automatic calculator, which could make decisions based on the results of previous computations. This machine was also intended to employ several features subsequently used in modern computers, including sequential control, branching, and looping.

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Ada Lovelace Copyright (c) 1997. Maxfield & Montrose Interactive Inc		Working with Babbage was Augusta Ada Lovelace, the daughter of the English poet Lord Byron. Ada, who was a splendid mathematician and one of the few people who fully understood Babbage's vision, created a program for the Analytical Engine. Had the Analytical Engine ever actually worked, Ada's program would have been able to compute a mathematical sequence known as Bernoulli numbers. Based on this work, Ada is now credited as being the first computer programmer and, in 1979, a modern programming language was named ADA in her honor.
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Babbage worked on his Analytical Engine from around 1830 until he died, but sadly it was never completed. It is often said that Babbage was a hundred years ahead of his time and that the technology of the day was inadequate for the task. Refuting this is the fact that, in 1834, two Swedish engineers called Georg and Edward Scheutz built a small Difference Engine based on Babbage's description. In his book, Engines of the Mind, Joel Shurkin stated:
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"One of Babbage's most serious flaws was his inability to stop tinkering. No sooner would he send a drawing to the machine shop than he would find a better way to perform the task and would order work stopped until he had finished pursuing the new line. By and large this flaw kept Babbage from ever finishing anything."

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Further supporting this theory is the fact that, in 1876, only five years after Babbage's death, an obscure inventor called George Barnard Grant exhibited a full-sized difference engine of his own devising at the Philadelphia Centennial Fair. Grant's machine was 8 feet wide, 5 feet tall, and contained over 15,000 moving parts.		The point is that, although Babbage's Analytical Engine was intellectually far more sophisticated than his Difference Engine, constructing an Analytical Engine would not have been beyond the technology of the day.

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These notes are abstracted from the book Bebop BYTES Back (An Unconventional Guide to Computers) Copyright Information