Creation of analytical engine

The Analytical Engine was a mechanical general-purpose computer designed by the English mathematician Charles Babbage, who began to conceive it in the 1830s after his work on the Difference Engine. It would have had a store for numbers, a central unit for arithmetic that he called the mill, and instructions fed in on punched cards in the manner of the Jacquard loom, which would have allowed it to be programmed. Ada Lovelace, who translated an article about it, added notes that included a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers, and is often described as writing the first program. The engine was never completed, because of costs and the limits of the engineering of the time.

Open on the timeline