Analytical/Engine

• Analytical Engine

  • Overview

    • A general-purpose mechanical computer designed by Person/Charles Babbage, first described in 18/3/7. It was never built.

  • Mechanism

    • The mill did arithmetic and the store held numbers, the same split later computers make between processor and memory.
    • Programs and data went in on punched cards, borrowed from the Jacquard loom that wove patterns into cloth.
    • The design allowed loops and conditional branching, which is what makes it general-purpose rather than a calculator.

  • Context

    • It followed Babbage's Difference Engine, which could only compute tables of polynomial values.
    • Person/Ada Lovelace's 1843 notes describe what it could do, including a program for Bernoulli numbers. She wrote that it "weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves."
    • Babbage's son Henry built part of the mill around 1910. No complete engine has been built.

  • Links

    • Wikipedia