hine, which he called a Difference Engine. By 1822, he had a working model to demonstrate. With financial help from the British government, Babbage started fabrication of the Difference Engine in 1823. It was intended to be steam powered and fully automatic, including the printing of the resulting tables, and commanded by a fixed instruction program. The Difference Engine, although having limited adaptability and applicability, was really a great advance. Babbage continued to work on it for the next ten years, but in 1833 he lost interest to what he thought was a better idea. Babbage wanted to start construction on what would now be called a general purpose, fully program-controlled, automatic mechanical digital computer. Babbage called his idea an Analytical Engine. The ideas of this design showed a lot of foresight, although they would not be appreciated until a full century later. The plans for this engine required an identical decimal computer operating on numbers of fifty decimal digits (or words), and having a storage capacity (memory) of one thousand such digits. The built-in operations were supposed to include everything that a modern, general - purpose computer would need. There was even to be a Conditional Control Transfer Capability that would allow commands to be executed in any order, not just the order in which they were programmed. The analytical engine was to use punched cards (similar to those used in a Jacquard loom), which would be read into the machine from several different Reading Stations. The machine was supposed to operate automatically, by steam power, and require only one user. Babbage's computers were never finished. There are various theories for why he failed. Most view his lack of precision machining techniques to be at fault. Another speculation is that Babbage was working on a solution for a problem that few people in 1840 really needed to solve. After Babbage's attempts, there was a t...
