To most people, the phrase “electronic computer” conjures up a baffling maze of wires, transistors, magnetic tapes, punch cards, and the like, which can somehow or other be used to solve problems of ...

Ada Lovelace, daughter of poet Lord Byron and mathematician Annabella Milbanke, became the world's first programmer in 1843 with her algorithm for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine. Learning to ...

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 ...

A programmable calculator designed by British scientist Charles Babbage. After his Difference Engine failed its test in 1833, Babbage started the design of the Analytical Engine in 1834. Developed in ...

The bicentenary of Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, heralds the critical reassessment of a remarkable figure in the history of Victorian science. Ada Lovelace (as she is now known) was 27 years ...

The first programmable computer—if it were built—would have been a gigantic, mechanical thing clunking along with gears and levers and punch cards. That was the vision for Analytical Engine devised by ...