English Essay, Paragraph, Speech on “Charles Babbage” for Kids and Students for Class 8, 9, 10, Class 12 and Graduation Examination
Charles Babbage
The earliest known modern computer device was the analytical engine invented by Charles Babbage. Charles Babbage’s mechanical analytical engine used a processing unit called the mill, stored number of programs, used punch cards for data input, and printed an output. Being mechanical rather than electrical, the analytical engine worked by a series of gears and levers. Charles Babbage started building his analytical engine in 1833 and continued to tinker on his machine until the day he died. According to public lecture on Charles Babbage given by Philip Machanick at the University of the Witwatersrand, “What made the analytical engine such a feat of engineering was that it was built before the discovery of electronics, and was entirely mechanical. Its memory consisted of gears while the processing unit, or mill, consisted of cams, clutches, cranks and gears. The analytical engine project grew out of an earlier, less ambitious project, the difference engine. Where the difference engine did a relatively fixed computation, the analytical engine was designed to be a truly general computational device. The use of cards to record a program was inspired by the Jacquard loom, in which punched cards controlled the pattern being woven.”