Charles Babbage was a British mathematician. He designed an analytical engine which was the forerunner of the modern computer. He was born in 1801 and died in 1871. Educated at Cambridge, he occupied the Lucasian chair of mathematics at Cambridge for eleven years, but delivered no lectures. As early as 1812 he conceived the idea of calculating numerical tables by machinery, and in 1823 he received a grant from government for the construction of such a machine. After a series of experiments lasting eight years, and an expenditure of 17,000 pounds (6000 pounds of which was sunk by himself, the balance voted by government), Babbage abandoned the undertaking in favour of a much more enlarged work, an analytical engine, worked with cards like the jacquard-loom; but the project was never completed. The incompleted machine is now in the South KensingtonMuseum (Science Museum). Among the many treatises he published on subjects connected with mathematics and mechanics few can be regarded as finished performances. Research Charles Babbage
Ada is a computer programming language developed for the US Department of Defence which permits the development of very large computer systems and can cope with complex real-time applications. It was named after Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, daughter of LordByron, who worked with Charles Babbage. Research Ada
A computer is a programmable, usually electronic, device. The modern computer is generally accepted to have been invented during the 19th century by the mathematician Charles Babbage.
Computers are of two distinct types: analog and digital. Analog computers operate by manipulating electrical potentials, voltage in simple terms. Digital computers operate on fixed values, usually the binary code of one and zero. Modern computers are generally digital, and certainly all personal computers are digital.
Early digital computers used electrical relays as their two-state (binary) devices - two-state, they were either 'on' or 'off'. These early digital computers were first made during the 1940's, were large and were used for military purposes and in a few research laboratories. They were unreliable due to the unreliability of the physical contacts of the relays, and were very low speed - compared to modern computers. During the 1950's valves or vacuum tubes replaced relays in digital computers, and by the 1960's they in turn were replaced by transistors - enabling a computer with the power of one which filled a room in the 1950's to be built which would fit in a shoe box. Transistors were in turn replaced by the integrated circuit or 'silicon chip', allowing computers to be made even smaller and smaller.
In 1980 Sir Clive Sinclair revolutionised computing with the invention of the ZX80 domestic micro computer, and a year later marketed the ZX81, the first computer to be built with just four siliconchips. Shortly afterwards the personal computer or PC emerged aimed at the business market. Research Computer
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