Charles Babbage

What Babbage contributed

Babbage adapted the punched-card logic used in Jacquard weaving for a proposed programmable calculating engine. His plans distinguished a “store” for numbers from a “mill” for operations and described repeated, conditional and sequenced calculation.

Why it mattered

The Analytical Engine was not completed in his lifetime, but its architecture supplied later historians and computer designers with an unusually detailed nineteenth-century model of programmable computation.