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Analytical Engine, 1838 ALLAN G Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, 1838 ALLAN G. BROMLEY Charles Babbage commenced work on the design of the Analytical Engine in 1834 following the collapse of the project to build the Difference Engine. His ideas evolved rapidly, and by 1838 most of the important concepts used in his later designs were established. This paper introduces the design of the Analytical Engine as it stood in early 1838, concentrating on the overall functional organization of the mill (or central processing portion) and the methods generally used for the basic arithmetic operations of multiplication, division, and signed addition. The paper describes the working of the mechanisms that Babbage devised for storing, transferring, and adding numbers and how they were organized together by the “microprogrammed” control system; the paper also introduces the facilities provided for user- level programming. The intention of the paper is to show that an automatic computing machine could be built using mechanical devices, and that Babbage’s designs provide both an effective set of basic mechanisms and a workable organization of a complete machine. Categories and Subject Descriptors: K.2 [History of Computing]- C. Babbage, hardware, software General Terms: Design Additional Key Words and Phrases: Analytical Engine 1. Introduction 1838. During this period Babbage appears to have made no attempt to construct the Analytical Engine, Charles Babbage commenced work on the design of but preferred the unfettered intellectual exploration of the Analytical Engine shortly after the collapse in 1833 the concepts he was evolving. of the lo-year project to build the Difference Engine. After 1849 Babbage ceased designing calculating He was at the time 42 years o1d.l devices. He returned to the subject in about 1856, at Progress on the Analytical Engine went rapidly. The the age of 64, probably inspired by the completion of first notes appeared in mid-1834, and by mid-1836 a the Scheutz Difference Engine, which had been devel- workable design had evolved. A major revision of the oped from a description of his own earlier Difference design took place in late 1837. For the next decade Engine. In this second phase of work on the Analytical work on the Analytical Engine consisted largely of Engine, Babbage concentrated on methods by which refinement and elaboration of the basic design of 1837- it might be built at a reasonable price and explored both precision-stamping and pressure-diecasting tech- 0 1982 by the American Federation of Information Processing niques. A substantial model was under construction at Societies, Inc. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this the time of his death in 1871 at the age of almost 80. material is granted provided that the copies are not made or Very little in the way of a general introduction to distributed for direct commercial advantage, the AFIPS copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice the Analytical Engine was written in Babbage’s life- is given that copying is by permission of the American Federation time. At the end of 1837 Babbage wrote a general of Information Processing Societies, Inc. To copy otherwise, or to description, but it was not published until recent times republish, requires specific permission. Author’s Address: Basser Department of Computer Science, Mad- (Randell 1973). In 1840 Babbage journeyed to Turin sen Building F09, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia. and presented a series of seminars to a group of ’ For a thorough account of the history of Babbage’s involvement distinguished Italian scientists with the intention that with the design of calculating machines, see Collier (1970) and Hyman (1982). one of them would publish an account of his ideas. 0 1982 AFIPS 0164-l 239/82/030196-217$01 .OO/OO Such a description was published by L. F. Menabrea 196 * Annals of the History of Computing, Volume 4, Number 3, July 1982 A. G. Bromley * Analytical Engine and subsequently translated from French into English Three other persons have studied the Babbage pa- by Ada Lovelace in 1843 (Babbage 1889). The trans- pers in the Science Museum collection. Collier (1970) lation has extensive notes, written under Babbage’s has provided an excellent overview of Babbage’s work supervision, that give an excellent account of his un- on automatic calculating devices. His study, based derstanding of the mechanization of computational largely on the notebooks and on the correspondence processes and the mathematical powers of the ma- in the British Library and the Buxton papers in Ox- chine. Unfortunately, none of the contemporary ac- ford, is primarily concerned with the intellectual his- counts give any useful technical detail on the mecha- tory of Babbage’s ideas and in particular with the nism or design of the Analytical Engine, and it is transition from the special-purpose Difference Engine impossible from them to assess its merits as a com- to the general-purpose Analytical Engine. Wilkes puting machine. (1971) has studied the notebooks to achieve a more Babbage did, however, keep extensive private notes detailed understanding of some aspects of the user- on the design of the mechanism of the Analytical programming facilities of the Analytical Engine than Engine. The notes, now in the collections of the Sci- is provided in the present paper. Hyman (1982) has ence Museum in London, comprise about 300 sheets also provided an overview of Babbage’s calculating of engineering drawings, typically 2 by 3 feet; 600-700 machines in the context of a biographical study of “notations’‘-abstract representations of the mecha- Babbage’s wide-ranging intellectual achievements. nism such as timing diagrams, logic diagrams, flow- The present paper is the first one based primarily charts, state-transition diagrams, and walk-&roughs on a detailed study of Babbage’s notations and is of microprograms, all typically 2 by 3 feet or larger of therefore the first to provide a detailed account of the close handwriting; and 6000-7000 pages of notebooks. organization of the machine and in particular of the The total amount of material is daunting, and it suffers sophistication of Babbage’s microprogramming ideas. the disadvantage that it is largely very detailed and It discusses only one model out of the complete evo- technical in nature and does not provide much over- lutionary range of Babbage’s designs (though one I view of the design. In particular, matters such as the believe to be in most respects typical), and many of intended user’s instruction set are difficult to deter- the conclusions must therefore be regarded as tenta- mine, although there are several dozen sample pro- tive pending the extension of this study to other de- grams prepared between 1837 and 1840 (all, inciden- signs. tally, substantially predating the preparation of Ada In almost all its facets Babbage’s work on the Ana- Lovelace’s notes, which incorporate several of them). lytical Engine was completely original-the only an- This paper gives an account of the design of the tecedent was his own Difference Engine. Only in the Analytical Engine as it stood in 1838. It was this basic adoption of the barrel, from automata and music design that Babbage refined and elaborated in the boxes, and punched cards, from the Jacquard loom, is period up to 1848. The description is based on a close there any significant borrowing from an existing tech- examination of the papers in the Science Museum, but nology, but Babbage’s substantial elaboration of the has been simplified in many respects, particularly with capabilities of these, as well as his specific application regard to details of the mechanism. The intention of of them, is again quite original. this paper is to show that an automatic computing machine could be built using mechanical devices and 2. Overview that Babbage’s designs provide both an effective set of basic mechanisms and a workable organization of a The Analytical Engine was a decimal machine that complete machine. The paper is also intended to serve used a sign-and-magnitude representation for numbers as an introduction to more detailed analyses of Bab- bage’s designs that are in preparation. The paper starts with a discussion of mechanical Allan G. Bromley received a B.Sc. in Physics in devices for the storage, transfer, and addition of num- 1967 and a Ph.D. in theoretical astrophysics in 1971 bers. The arrangement of these basic parts into a from the University of Sydney. He joined the block-diagram-level description of the organization of university’s Basser Department of Computer Science the machine is presented. The algorithms for multi- in 1972 and is now a senior lecturer. In 1979, on plication, division, and signed addition are then de- leave at the Science Museum, London, he first scribed along with the mechanism by which the con- became seriously interested in the work of Babbage trol of these was microprogrammed. Finally, the user and has since also studied mechanical analog programming of the Analytical Engine is examined as computing devices and the intellectual threads that it was understood at this stage of the design. led to the emergence of digital computers in the 1940s. Annals of the History of Computing, Volume 4, Number 3, July 1982 * 197 A. G. Bromley * Analytical Engine in the store. Babbage’s decisions to adopt decimal and All numbers in the Analytical Engine are of 40 sign-and-magnitude number representation (both of digits, and there are 40 cages and 40 figure wheels on which are now uncommon) were arrived at after care- each axis. This large number was possibly chosen to ful deliberation. simplify scaling problems in the absence of a floating- Modern computers are largely binary because it is point number system.
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