Computersight -

We generally think of computers as being modern technological discoveries but the first digital computer was designed more than two hundred years ago.

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Charles Babbage (1792 to 1871) was an English scientist, mathematician and philosopher who was born in a small house in London. The house still stands and there is a special blue plaque on the wall at the junction of the street which is awarded by English Heritage and denotes that it is a place with special historical links.

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This mathematician drew up his plans for a fully programmable digital computer in 1834 but he never saw it completed.

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His analytical engine was an advanced development of the adding machine which he had invented twenty years before and it was designed to be programmed by a series of punched cards and made calculations by utilising a memory store and then printed out the answers. It could operate at the speed of one addition per second which was lightening fast at the time.

Although the machines designed by Babbage were very bulky compared to today’s sleek models, the general layout was the same and the memory and data were separate and their operation was based on instruction.

The British government had invested the huge sum of seventeen thousand pounds in the engine and Charles Babbage managed to raise a further six thousand pounds to get the project off the ground, but a very high degree of precision was required to produce the component pieces needed and it turned out to be beyond the capabilities of even the best of Victorian engineers.

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At this point (1842) everyone started to lose enthusiasm for the project and after the Astronomer Royal, George Airy, had publicly announced that the project was useless and therefore worthless, the government withdrew its support.  Babbage did struggle on in the hope of completing what he knew would be a successful design, but struggled unsuccessfully because of the lack of funds and support until his death thirty years later.

So, we all had to wait for Bill Gates to come along with his Windows operating systems before computers really became accessible and affordable for everyone to use.