Charles Babbage designed The Analytical Engine, that was a mechanical general purpose (Turing complete) computer, in 1837. This is remarkable, because it came a century before all the theory that was put in place by Turing, which inspired, and is at the heart of, today’s computers. You can find a description of The Analytical Engine in Babbage’s biography: “Passages from the Life of a Philosopher”. His apprentice Ada Lovelace wrote some programs for it, becoming the first programmer in history.
This fact inspired a lot of Steampunk fiction, reasoning along the lines of: “What if the Analytical Engine was actually built and improved upon at that time? What if other non general purpose mechanical calculators like The Difference Engine followed the same development of the ones based on circuits we saw during the twentieth century?”
Charles Babbage designed The Analytical Engine, that was a mechanical general purpose (Turing complete) computer, in 1837. This is remarkable, because it came a century before all the theory that was put in place by Turing, which inspired, and is at the heart of, today’s computers. You can find a description of The Analytical Engine in Babbage’s biography: “Passages from the Life of a Philosopher”. His apprentice Ada Lovelace wrote some programs for it, becoming the first programmer in history.
This fact inspired a lot of Steampunk fiction, reasoning along the lines of: “What if the Analytical Engine was actually built and improved upon at that time? What if other non general purpose mechanical calculators like The Difference Engine followed the same development of the ones based on circuits we saw during the twentieth century?”