Charles Babbage made plans for the first automated computer 150 years before the dawn of the PC. But would it have worked?
Charles Babbage was a man way ahead of his time. So far ahead, in fact, that the inventor died, in 1871, before the technology was available to realise his great ambition — to build the first computing machine. So it was a good job that he could draw. Babbage left a valuable legacy of 1,000 sketches and designs for his Difference and Analytical Engines, mechanical computers that would one day form the basis of the modern PC.
It is from these meticulous plans that an attempt is now under way to build the most complex of the machines, the Analytical Engine,