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 ...

THE electronic computer, young as it is, has come to play a role in modern life something like that played in other times by the oracles of Greece and Rome. There is a widespread belief that if one ...

*One of the many Gothic aspects of the Difference Engine was that the device, which was never successfully built, was never quite entirely dead, either. Babbage's youngest son, a career military ...