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You're in luck! We discovered the Charles Babbage Institute and several other biographical sources in our very own Charles Babbage category. By browsing through the collected sites, we learned that Charles Babbage invented a machine that could perform complex mathematical computations. Thus, he is often referred to as the "father of computing." However, as it turns out, the prototype of his machine wasn't actually built until several years after Babbage's death. Born in London on December 26, 1792, as a young man Babbage worked as a mathematician, gradually becoming obsessed with the
design and manufacture of artificial calculating machines. Despite many groundbreaking academic papers on advanced mathematics, including the smash bestseller Table of Logarithms of the Natural Numbers from 1 to 108,000 (1827), the inventor's failure to actually construct his calculating machines eventually left Babbage a disappointed and embittered man. He died in London on October 18, 1871. Invented, yet unbuilt in his lifetime, Babbage's analytical engines were general purpose calculators, embodying many features that later reappeared in the modern stored-program computer: punch ed card controls, separate storage, a set of internal registers,
fast multipliers and dividers, a range of peripherals, and even array processing. You can see a working model of the "Difference Engine" in London's Science Museum. It's a far cry from a spiffy new laptop, but the seeds of the technology are there.
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