Babbage's first attempt at a mechanical computing device, the Difference Engine, was a special-purpose machine … See more

Late in his life, Babbage sought ways to build a simplified version of the machine, and assembled a small part of it before his death in 1871.
In 1878, a committee of the British Associatio… See more

Babbage is not known to have written down an explicit set of instructions for the engine in the manner of a modern processor manual. Instead he showed his programs as lists of states during their execution, showing w… See more

Babbage understood that the existence of an automatic computer would kindle interest in the field now known as algorithmic efficiency, writing in his Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, "As soon a… See more

If the analytical engine had been built, it would have been digital, programmable and Turing-complete. It would, however, have been very slow. Luigi Federico Menabrea reported in Sketch of the Analytical Engine: "Mr. Babba… See more

• The cyberpunk novelists William Gibson and Bruce Sterling co-authored a steampunk novel of alternative history titled The Difference Engine in which Babbage's difference and analytical engines became available t… See more