Charles Babbage 1792-1871

Invented the first computer (depending on what you consider a computer to be).

On two occasions I have been asked by members of Parliament, "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

-- Charles Babbage,

• Was socially responsible

• Thought the voting process would be more reputable and honest if you didn’t use people.

• Build a simple working version of the difference engine

because he had skills as a technician (and smarts).

• But gave up / ran out of money and decided to to create the Analytic engine, which would have used a punch card system, had it ever been build.

• Was eventually created and proven to work.

• Invented the Cow catcher!

• Street musicians played at his funeral

Difference

Engine

If the Analytical Engine had been built, it would have been in many ways more advanced than some of the first computers that emerged in the 1940s. It would have been digital, programmable and Turing complete. However, it would have been very slow. Ada Lovelace reported in her notes on the Analytical engine: "Mr. Babbage believes he can, by his engine, form the product of two numbers, each containing twenty figures, in three minutes". By comparison the Harvard Mark I could perform the same task in just six seconds. A modern PC can do the same thing in well under a billionth of a second.

Being equivalent to the universal Turing machine essentially means being able to perform any computational task—though it does not mean being able to perform such tasks efficiently, quickly, or easily.The term derives from the name of mathematician Alan Turing who introduced the model of the universal Turing machine.

Ada Lovelace

First programmer ever (computed the Bernoulli numbers) for the Analytic Engine (which was never built).

Daughter of Lord Byron.