Babbages Engine Reaches 200

Am an avid historian of computation: 

Babbages Engine is 200 years old

Below just an  intro, go to the link for more and furtherlinks.

Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine Turns 200 Error-riddled astronomical tables inspired the first computer—and the first vaporware ALLISON MARSH  27 MAY 20227 MIN READ

IT WAS AN IDEA born of frustration, or at least that’s how Charles Babbage would later recall the events of the summer of 1821. That fateful summer, Babbage and his friend and fellow mathematician John Herschel were in England editing astronomical tables. Both men were founding members of the Royal Astronomical Society, but editing astronomical tables is a tedious task, and they were frustrated by all of the errors they found. Exasperated, Babbage exclaimed, “I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam.” To which Herschel replied, “It is quite possible.“

Babbage and Herschel were living in the midst of what we now call the Industrial Revolution, and steam-powered machinery was already upending all types of business. Why not astronomy too?

Babbage set to work on the concept for a Difference Engine, a machine that would use a clockwork mechanism to solve polynomial equations. He soon had a small working model (now known as Difference Engine 0), and on 14 June 1822, he presented a one-page “Note respecting the Application of Machinery to the Calculation of Astronomical Tables” to the Royal Astronomical Society. His note doesn’t go into much detail—it’s only one page, after all—but Babbage claimed to have “repeatedly constructed tables of squares and triangles of numbers” as well as of the very specific formula x2 + x + 41. He ends his note with much optimism: “From the experiments I have already made, I feel great confidence in the complete success of the plans I have proposed.” That is, he wanted to build a full-scale Difference Engine.  ... '