Charles Babbage is considered by some to be the father of the computer. Over a century before Alan Turing made history with his mathematical models, Babbage developed a complex mechanical device that could automatically arrange polynomial functions, which he called the Difference Engine. The Difference Engine’s design was succeeded in 1837, when Babbage proposed the Analytical Engine, the first general-purpose computer design that was Turing-complete (in that it could simulate the computational aspects of a real-world computer). Babbage died on October 18, 1871, at age 79, at which point none of his designs had been fully constructed, but the Difference Engine’s design was validated in 1991 when a working model was made.
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