The Babbage Engine Exhibit opens May 10 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. The central artifact of the exhibit, a faithful construction of Englishman Charles Babbage's Difference ...

IIIF provides researchers rich metadata and media viewing options for comparison of works across cultural heritage collections. Visit the IIIF page to learn more. This is a replica of the portion of a ...

Englishman Charles Babbage (1791–1871), an eccentric, ingenious mathematician, decided that existing tables of computations included far too many errors: the day's textbooks came with errata sheets ...

As you might expect from its name, the "Difference Engine" is a strangely difficult object to describe. You might start by imagining the side of a large crib with uprights ringed by small metal wheels ...

German engineer and inventor Konrad Zuse is considered as the inventor of the modern computer but was frustrated in his ...

In 1847, at the age of just twenty-seven, Ada Lovelace became the world’s first computer programmer—more than a century before the first computer was even built. This almost sounds like a myth, or the ...

Throughout history, humans have made independent, more or less simultaneous discoveries and inventions. For example, Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz discovered calculus, Charles Darwin and ...

The first modern electronic digital computer was called the Atanasoff–Berry computer, or ABC. It was built by physics Professor John Vincent Atanasoff and his graduate student, Clifford Berry, in 1942 ...

A century before the dawn of the computer age, Ada Lovelace imagined the modern-day, general-purpose computer. It could be programmed to follow instructions, she wrote in 1843. It could not just ...