Charles Babbage

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Charles Babbage Born December 26, 1791 in Teignmouth, Devonshire UK, Died 1871, London; Known to some as the "Father of Computing" for his contributions to the basic design of the computer through his Analytical machine. His previous Difference Engine was a special purpose device intended for the production of tables. While he did produce prototypes of portions of the Difference Engine, it was left to Georg and Edvard Schuetz to construct the first working devices to the same design which were successful in limited applications. Significant Events in His Life: 1791: Born; 1810: Entered Trinity College, Cambridge; 1814: graduated Peterhouse; 1817 received MA from Cambridge; 1820: founded the Analytical Society with Herschel and Peacock; 1823: started work on the Difference Engine through funding from the British Government; 1827: published a table of logarithms from 1 to 108000; 1828: appointed to the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge (never presented a lecture); 1831: founded the British Association for the Advancement of Science; 1832: published "Economy of Manufactures and Machinery"; 1833: began work on the Analytical Engine; 1834: founded the Statistical Society of London; 1864: published Passages from the Life of a Philosopher; 1871: Died. The Charles Babbage Memorial Fund honors Charles Babbage, the English inventor and mathematician who, in the 1800's, believed he could build a computing machine. He convinced the British government to finance his project, then billed the government for more and more. Many years later -- and many British pounds later -- he still hadn't finished his machine. So he dropped the idea and -- can you believe this? -- tried to build an even fancier machine. He didn't finish that one either. You might say his life was a failure that was expensive for the British government! But Charles Babbage is admired by computerists (in spite of his face, which was even sterner than Beethoven's), because he was the first person to realize that a computing machine must be composed of an input device (he used a card reader inspired by Jacquard's punched cards for looms), a memory (which he called The Store), a central processing unit (which he called The Mill), and an output device (he used a printer). He also made provision for early results to modify later calculations. Charles Babbage is, indeed, the grandfather of the digital computer. Reference: The Secret Guide to Computers by Russ Walter (phone: 617-666-2666). Although the analytical engine astonishingly anticipated the computer, a significant difference is that it was decimal, not binary. Since Babbage's machine was not electronic, he did not think in binary terms. The use of wheels and gears meant that his system was not "purely" digital, in the modern sense. Source: Norman T. Gridgeman http://nano.xerox.com/nanotech/babbage.html Some references: 1.R.A. Hyman, Charles Babbage: Pioneer of the Computer, Oxford University Press, 1982. 2.R.A. Hyman (ed.), Science and Reform: Selected Works of Charles Babbage Cambridge University Press, 1989. 3.J. Palfreman and D. Swade, The Dream Machine, BBC Books, London, 1991. 4.D. Swade, Charles Babbage and his Calculating Engines, Science Museum, London, 1991. 5.F. Spufford and J. Uglow, eds; Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention, Faber and Faber, London, 1996.