Charles Babbage's Engines

Charles Babbage (1791–1871) — mathematician, philosopher, mechanical engineer, and by most accounts a thoroughly restless Victorian gentleman.His Difference Engine was a mechanical calculator, designed to compute polynomial values automatically — and to print the results, removing human error from mathematical tables.His far more ambitious Analytical Engine was something else entirely: a general-purpose, programmable computer — a century before electronics made one practical. It had a "mill" (processor), a "store" (memory), and was to be fed instructions on Jacquard-style punched cards.He never finished building it. But he had, in effect, designed a computer.