The Analytical Engine

One of Babbage’s reasons for abandoning the Difference Engine was that he had been struck by a much better idea. Inspired by Jacquard’s punched-card-controlled loom, Babbage wanted to build a punched-card-controlled calculator. Babbage called this machine the Analytical Engine.

The Analytical Engine could carry out any calculation. All one had to do was to punch the cards with the instructions for the desired calculation. This machine was also intended to employ several features subsequently used in modern computers, including sequential control, branching, and looping, and would have been the first mechanical device to be Turing-complete.

If the Analytical Engine had been completed, it would have been a nineteenth-century computer. But the Analytical Engine was not completed. The government had already sunk thousands of pounds into the Difference Engine and received nothing in return. It had no intention of repeating mistakes.

The government may have been right. Even if it had financed the new invention, it might have got nothing in return. For the idea was far ahead of what the existing mechanical technology could build. And this was true because Babbage’s design was grandiose. For instance, he planned for the Analytical Engine to do calculations with fifty-digit accuracy.

Even though the Analytical Engine was never completed a demonstration program for it was written. The author of that program is Augusta Ada Byron, later Countess of Lovelace, the only legitimate daughter of the poet Lord Byron. Ada was an excellent mathematician. She was good at languages and music and was fond of horse racing.

Ada became interested in Babbage’s Analytical Engine when she studied mathematics with one of the most well known mathematicians of her time Augustus de Morgan.

In 1842 Lady Lovelace discovered a paper on the Analytical Engine. The paper was written in French and Ada translated it into English and added her own notes.

To demonstrate how the Analytical Engine would work, Lady Lovelace included in her notes a program for calculating a certain series of numbers that was of interest to mathematicians. This was the world’s first computer program. And the author of that program has the honour of being the world’s first computer programmer.

Find English equivalents in the text.

Вдохновлять, выполнять вычисления, точность, изобретение, сделать открытие, опережать.

The Harvard Mark I

A hundred years passed before a machine like the machine Babbage conceived was actually built. This occurred in 1944 when Howard Aiken of Harvard University completed the Harvard Mark I.

Mark I was controlled by a punched paper tape, which played the same role as Babbage’s punched cards. It was basically mechanical and was driven by the electricity. Electricity served to transmit information from one part of the machine to another and replaced the complex mechanical linkages that Babbage had proposed. Using electricity made the difference between success and failure.

The Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (Harvard Mark I) was the first operating machine that could execute long computations automatically. A project conceived by Harvard University's Dr. Howard Aiken, the Mark I was built by IBM engineers in Endicott, N.Y. A steel frame 51 feet (16 m) long and eight feet high held the calculator, which consisted of an interlocking panel of small gears, counters, switches and control circuits, all only a few inches in depth. The ASCC used 500 miles (800 km) of wire with three million connections, 3,500 multipole relays with 35,000 contacts, 2,225 counters, 1,464 tenpole switches and tiers of 72 adding machines, each with 23 significant numbers. It was the industry's largest electromechanical calculator.

But the Mark I was scarcely finished before it was obsolete. The electromechanical machines were not fast enough. Their speed was limited by the time required for mechanical parts to move from one position to another. Mark I took six seconds for a multiplication and twelve for a division. This was only six times faster than what a human with an old desk calculator could do.