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Work Underway To Finally Build Babbage's Analytical Engine
mikejuk writes "Last year John Graham-Cumming launched a project to create a fully-functional implementation of Babbage's original design for a computer — the Analytical Engine. Now it looks as if the project is going ahead. The first phase is to digitize all of Babbage's papers and designs. These will be available to the general public in 2012. The machine to be built is no simple calculator: it is a full computer with a store for between 100 and 1000 values, each of 40 digits, and it was programmed using punched cards in a modern 'operator/address' format. There was even a plan to send the output to a printer. When this device is built it will make it clear that the computer age nearly began in the 18th century."
The entire design for the anaytical engine was extremely impressive. The main thing to realize is that the Analytical Engine was Turing Complete http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness. This means essentially that given enough time and memory it could emulate any program you want to. There's an idea called the Church-Turing thesis which says roughly that the set of things which a Turing machine can do are precisely the things which humans can algorithmically simulate. To appreciate how highly this speaks of the actual design of the Engine one should realize that many early computers like the Harvard Mark I were not Turing complete (although all the early Zuse machines were.)
The 1800s are the 19th century, how did this not get edited?