Post

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can only do what we tell it. The possibility of arranging the operations of the Engine in what I call cycles of operations suggests that it could compute not merely numbers but any symbol that can be manipulated by rule — music, logic, perhaps things we have not yet imagined. The Engine is not a thinking machine. But it is the first machine whose limits are defined only by the limits of human instruction.