Analytical Engine
More info
- Creator
- Charles Babbage
- Released
- 1837 (never built)
- Type
- Mechanical computer
- Memory
- 1,000 numbers of 50 digits
A programmable computer made of gears, designed a century too early and therefore never built.
Charles Babbage described the machine in 1837 and kept working on the drawings until his death in 1871. The design has everything a computer needs: an arithmetic unit he called the mill, a memory called the store holding a thousand decimal numbers of fifty digits, input and output on punched cards borrowed from the loom, and — crucially — conditional branching and loops. It is Turing-complete in all but name.
In Note G of her 1843 translation, Ada Lovelace set out how the machine would compute Bernoulli numbers, usually called the first published computer program. There was never a machine to run it on: the precision available in Victorian workshops, and Babbage's habit of starting over, meant only fragments were built. Not until 1991 did the Science Museum in London build his simpler Difference Engine from the original drawings — and it worked.