Information / Electronics & Computing

Analytical Engine & Punch Cards

Babbage designs a freely programmable calculator with memory and an arithmetic unit; Ada Lovelace writes the first program for it.

From 1837 Charles Babbage planned the Analytical Engine: an arithmetic unit (the “mill”), a memory (the “store”) and control by punched cards modeled on Jacquard looms (1804). In 1843 Ada Lovelace published an algorithm for computing Bernoulli numbers on the machine. It was never built; Herman Hollerith used punched cards for the 1890 US census in a business that later became IBM.