THE 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL INVENTORS OF ALL TIME

7 The 100 Most Influential Inventors of All Time 7

government, Babbage began to imagine ways to improve
it. Chiefly he thought about generalizing its operation so
that it could perform other kinds of calculations. By the
time funding ran out for his Difference Engine in 1833, he
had conceived of something far more revolutionary: a
general-purpose computing machine called the Ana lyt-
ical Engine.
The Analytical Engine was to be a general-purpose,
fully program-controlled, automatic mechanical digital
computer. It would be able to perform any calculation set
before it. There is no evidence that anyone before Babbage
had ever conceived of such a device, let alone attempted
to build one. The machine was designed to consist of
four components: the mill, the store, the reader, and the
printer. These components are the essential components
of every computer today. The mill was the calculating
unit, analogous to the central processing unit (CPU) in a
modern computer; the store was where data were held
prior to processing, exactly analogous to memory and
storage in today’s computers; and the reader and printer
were the input and output devices.
As with the Difference Engine, the project was far
more complex than anything theretofore built. The store
was to be large enough to hold 1,000 50-digit numbers;
this was larger than the storage capacity of any computer
built before 1960. The machine was to be steam-driven
and run by one attendant. The printing capability was
also ambitious, as it had been for the Difference Engine:
Babbage wanted to automate the process as much as
possible, right up to producing printed tables of numbers.
The reader was another new feature of the Analytical
Engine. Data (numbers) were to be entered on punched
cards, using the card-reading technology of the Jacquard
loom. Instructions were also to be entered on cards, another
idea taken directly from Joseph-Marie Jacquard. The use