The Computer Programs of Charles Babbage
Raúl Rojas · IEEE Annals of the History of Computing · 2020
The mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage drafted 26 code fragments between 1836 and 1840 for his unfinished “Analytical Engine.” The programs were embedded implicitly in tables representing execution traces. In this article, we explore the programming architecture of Babbage's mechanical computer, that is, its structure from the point of view of a programmer, based on those 26 coding examples preserved in the Babbage Papers Archive.