Talk:Charles Babbage

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Checklist last edited by	Pat Palmer 08:29, 12 May 2007 (CDT)

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Babbage stuff brought from history of computing

It would take [[Charles Babbage]], born on December 26, 
1971 and inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society to 
develop the first real successful automatic calculating 
machine
<ref>{{cite web|
url=http://web.mit.edu/invent/iow/babbage.html|
title=Lemelson-MIT Program, Inventor of the Week Archive|
date=February 2003|accessdate=2007-05-14}}</ref>.
In 1821, Babbage developed the Difference Engine No. 1, 
which was a functional machine designed to compile mathematical 
tables based on polynomial caculation.
<ref>{{cite web|
url=http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~ped/teachadmin/histsci/htmlform/lect4.html|
title=History of Computation|author=Dunne, Paul E.|accessdate=2007-05-14}}</ref>.
 The difference engine's physical algorithm was based on a 
mathematical technique known as the Method of Differences, 
which Babbage contributed work on.  Unfortunately only a 
fragment of the machine would ever come to fruitition due 
to various financial disputes and accusations of fund 
mismanagement from the British Government.

More importantly, the machine was never fully developed 
due to Babbage's realization of a more improved machine
 called the Analytical Engine.  Functionally, the Analytical 
machine was capable of various algorithmic operations that 
were broken down into basic algebraic operations.  Two cards 
would be used to program the system: the first would detail 
what operations were required to be performed, and the second 
would contain the values to be operated on.  In this sense, 
the Analytical Machine was much like a computer, having an 
input(the algorithm as described on a card), a processor(the 
machine), an output(the result), and memory(using a storage 
method--the cards themselves).

Like the pascaline, both the Difference and Analytical 
Engines relied on series of cogs and gears to compute values.