History
The Mechanical Age of Computing
Long before electronics, people tried to build machines that could calculate. The mechanical age of computing is the story of gears, levers and punched cards standing in for the work of the human mind, and of a handful of thinkers who saw further than the technology of their time allowed.
The central figure is Charles Babbage. In the 1820s he began designing the Difference Engine, a machine to calculate mathematical tables automatically, and then the far more ambitious Analytical Engine, a general-purpose computer with a memory and a processor controlled by instructions on punched cards. Working with him, Ada Lovelace wrote the first program and argued that such a machine could handle any information that could be written as symbols, not just numbers.
Neither engine was completed in their lifetimes. The mechanical approach ran into the limits of Victorian engineering, and the ideas were largely forgotten until the twentieth century. Punched-card tabulating machines, developed later in the century for census work, kept mechanical computing alive commercially until electronics finally caught up with the vision.
Frequently asked
What was the first mechanical computer?
Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, designed from the 1830s, was the first design for a general-purpose mechanical computer. It was never completed in his lifetime, though a working section of his earlier Difference Engine has since been built.