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The analytical engine was a proposed digital mechanical general-purpose computer designed by English mathematician and computer pioneer Charles Babbage. [2] [3] It was first described in 1837 as the successor to Babbage's Difference Engine, which was a design for a simpler mechanical calculator.
Charles Babbage wrote a series of programs for the Analytical Engine from 1837 to 1840. [166] The first program was finished in 1837. [ 167 ] The Engine was not a single physical machine, but rather a succession of designs that Babbage tinkered with until his death in 1871.
Babbage went on to design his much more general analytical engine, but later designed an improved "Difference Engine No. 2" design (31-digit numbers and seventh-order differences), [9] between 1846 and 1849. Babbage was able to take advantage of ideas developed for the analytical engine to make the new difference engine calculate more quickly ...
Difference Engine, 1822 – Charles Babbage's mechanical device to calculate polynomials. Analytical Engine, 1837 – A later Charles Babbage device that could be said to encapsulate most of the elements of modern computers. Odhner Arithmometer, 1873 – W. T. Odhner's calculator who had millions of clones manufactured until the 1970s.
Charles Babbage's first public exposition about his Analytical Engine at Accademia delle Scienze, Turin. [31] 1842 France: Timoleon Maurel patented the Arithmaurel, a mechanical calculator with a very intuitive user interface, especially for multiplying and dividing numbers because the result was displayed as soon as the operands were entered.
Ada Lovelace. In 1840, Charles Babbage was invited to give a seminar in Turin on his analytical engine, [12] the only public explanation he ever gave on the engine. [13] During Babbage's lecture, mathematician Luigi Menabrea wrote an account of the engine in French. [12]
Babbage's plans made his analytical engine the first general-purpose design that could be described as Turing-complete in modern terms. [ 46 ] [ 47 ] The analytical engine was programmed using punched cards , a method adapted from the Jacquard loom invented by Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1804, which controlled textile patterns with a sequence of ...
The Difference Engine (1990) is an alternative history novel by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. It is widely regarded as a book that helped establish the genre conventions of steampunk . It posits a Victorian-era Britain in which great technological and social change has occurred after entrepreneurial inventor Charles Babbage succeeded in ...