Is the output of your calculator wrong? Ask for a mechanic.

In the 1837 a proposal of Charles Babbage for a mechanical machine (the analytical engine) has been taken into consideration. The purpose of that machine was to replicate the human behaviour in the case of the mathematical computations.This was the first approach to the computer science before the coming of electronics. That mechanical machine consisted in: a mechanical engine, an ALU (Arithmetic Logic Unit), the input data were to be provided by punched cards and the output computation by three readers punched cards. The computation language for programming the machine was very close to the assembly code and it had as the computation power well as the Universal Turing Machine. In fact it had a data memory of 1000 numbers and 50 codes and 40 arithmetical operations. The building of the analytical engine was delayed until the 1910 when Herny, the Charles Babbage’s youngest son, got the funds for assembling a “basic analytical engine”. Only In 1991, the London Science Museum built a complete version of Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 2 in compliance to the original specifications.

La macchina analitica di Babbage.

Babbage’s analytical engine.

The actual general-purpose computers don’t work by mechanical systems, but by complex microprocessors which execute many instructions in a little time. The high level of the devices integration made the number of mathematical operations in a CPU grew up per year. Today The most of electronics devices are based on a microprocessor logic that means the digital electronics built the base for the evolution of computer science and so for the ICT.

The modern microprocessors

The modern microprocessors

Comments are closed.