circa 1850: English mathematician and inventor, Charles Babbage (1792-1871).

We may claim that the first computer was William Oughtred's abacus or his descendent, the slide rule, developed in 1622. But the first computer similar to modern machinery was the Analytical Engine, a system designed and built between 1833 and 1871 by British mathematician Charles Babbage. Before Babbage's arrival, a computer was a person who sat all day, added and removed numbers and entered results in tables. The tables were subsequently shown in books so that other people might utilize them for activities such as properly throwing artillery shells or calculating taxes.



It was an enormous numbering job that motivated Babbage [source: Campbell-Kelly] in the first place. In 1790 Napoleon Bonaparte started the project when he ordered a change from the old imperial measuring system to the new metric system. Several human computers have been doing the required conversions and completing the table for ten years. However, Bonaparte could never publish the tables, and they were gathering dust at the Paris Academy of Sciences.


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Babbage visited the City of Light in 1819 and read the unpublished text page by page. If only, he thought, there was a method to create these tables more quickly, with less labour and fewer errors. He was thinking about the numerous wonders of the Industrial Revolution. If clever and industrious innovators can create the cotton gin and the steam engine, why not a calculating machine.


Babbage came back to England and resolved to construct a machine of this kind. His initial vision was called the Difference Engine, which operated on the concept of finite differences or by repeating more complicated mathematical computations without the need for multiplication or division. In 1824, he obtained government financing and had to complete his plan for eight years. In 1832, he created a working prototype for his table machine only to discover that his funding was gone.

But the tale doesn't stop there, as you may have suspected.



Charles Babbage and the Analytical Engine


Difference Engine No 1 was the first successful automatic calculator and remains one of the finest examples of precision engineering of the time.



Some may have been disheartened, but Babbage was not. Instead of reducing his design to ease the construction of the Difference Engine, he shifted his focus towards an even more outstanding concept – the analytical engine, a new kind of mechanical computer capable of performing much more complicated calculations involving multiplication and division.



The fundamental elements of the analytical engine are similar to components offered on the market today by any computer. It had two distinctive features of any modern machine: a central processing unit or CPU and memory. Of course, Babbage did not use such words. He termed the "mill" of the CPU. Memory was called the "store." He also had a device — a "reader" — for inputting instructions and a method to record machine results on paper. Babbage termed this output device like a printer, forerunner to today's inkjet and laser printer.



The innovation of Babbage existed nearly entirely on paper. He maintained a lot of notes and drawings on his computers, totalling over 5,000 pages. Although he never constructed an Analytical Engine production model, he had a clear picture of how the machine would appear and function. The same technology employed by the Jacquard loom enabled a weaving device to be automatically created in 1804-05, which allowed data to be input on punched cards. The computer storage could hold up to 1,000 50-digit numbers. Punched cards would also include the instructions that the machine may execute sequentially. A single guard would supervise the operation, but steam would power everything, turn cursors, move cameras and rods, and spin the gears.



Unfortunately, today's technology could not fulfil the splendid concept of Babbage. It wasn't until 1991 that his specific ideas eventually became a workable computer. According to Babbage's precise specifications, that's when the Science Museum in London constructed its Difference Engine. It is 11 meters long and 7 meters high, has 8,000 moving parts, weighs 15 tons and is over 3 meters large and 2 meters tall (13.6 metric tons). A replica was constructed and transported to the Museum of Computer History in Mountain View, California, displayed until December 2010. Neither device would work on a desktop, but they are the earliest computers and predecessors to a modern computer. These computers inspired the creation of the World Wide Web.


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