Abstract
THE black mark earned by the government of the day more than a hundred years ago for its failure to see Charles Babbage's difference engine brought to a sucessful conclusion has still to be wiped out. It is not too much to say that it cost Britain the leading place in the art of mechanical computing. Babbage then conceived and worked on his ‘analytical engine’, designed to store numbers and operate on them according to a sequence of processes conveyed to the machine by cards similar to those used in the Jacquard loom. This, however, was never completed.
A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator
By the Staff of the Computation Laboratory. (Annals of the Computation Laboratory of Harvard University, Vol. 1.) Pp. xiii + 561 + 17 plates. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1946.) 10 dollars.
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COMRIE, L. A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator. Nature 158, 567–568 (1946). https://doi.org/10.1038/158567a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/158567a0
