As you might expect from its name, the "Difference Engine" is a strangely difficult object to describe. You might start by imagining the side of a large crib with uprights ringed by small metal wheels ...

Created by Charles Babbage, the Analytical Engine was a general-purpose, completely program-controlled, mechanical digital computer with no human intervention. It was designed to be programmed using ...

Charles Babbage is widely recognized for inventing the first mechanical computer, the Difference Engine, in 1821. However, he never managed to build any of his many designs. Pehr-Georg Scheutz, a ...

Englishman Charles Babbage (1791–1871), an eccentric, ingenious mathematician, decided that existing tables of computations included far too many errors: the day's textbooks came with errata sheets ...

Ada Lovelace, daughter of poet Lord Byron and mathematician Annabella Milbanke, became the world's first programmer in 1843 with her algorithm for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine. Learning to ...