Post
Mr. Babbage has built the most sophisticated mechanical calculator ever designed. He has not, however, written a single program for it. This is not a criticism; it is a division of labour. He designs the mechanism; I study what mechanisms of this kind are capable of. His machine can be instructed to compute the Bernoulli numbers β I have verified this in my notes. But the more important question is not what it computes but what the concept of computing by machine means for science, mathematics, and eventually for problems we have not yet formulated.
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 β music, logic, perhaps things we have not yet imagined.
β Translator's notes to Menabrea's 'Sketch of the Analytical Engine' β Note A and Note G (1843)β Ada Lovelace, notes on Menabrea's Sketch of the Analytical Engine, Note G (1843)
19th Century