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analytical engine

n. (context computing English) A mechanical general-purpose computer, designed by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles%20Babbage but never built.

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Analytical Engine

The Analytical Engine was a proposed mechanical general-purpose computer designed by English mathematician and computer pioneer Charles Babbage. It was first described in 1837 as the successor to Babbage's difference engine, a design for a mechanical computer. The Analytical Engine incorporated an arithmetic logic unit, control flow in the form of conditional branching and loops, and integrated memory, making it the first design for a general-purpose computer that could be described in modern terms as Turing-complete. In other words, the logical structure of the Analytical Engine was essentially the same as that which has dominated computer design in the electronic era.

Babbage was never able to complete construction of any of his machines due to conflicts with his chief engineer and inadequate funding. It was not until the 1940s that the first general-purpose computers were actually built, more than a century after Babbage had proposed the pioneering Analytical Engine in 1837.

Usage examples of "analytical engine".

A vague glimpse even of an Analytical Engine opened out, and I pursued with enthusiasm the shadowy vision.

I brought my analytical engine with me from the laboratory, but its hardly a top-notch model.

Did it follow its owner into exile, was its meticulous stomping progress simple obedience to a mathematised rule in its analytical engine?

One wished to embrace her, to spill out the conflict he felt between his sensual license and his analytical engine of a mind.

Gianni sits down next to the renderer, which is currently extruding the inference mill of the analytical engine.

Babbage, who built the first primitive computer, the analytical engine.

A complete account of the calculating machine, as well as of an analytical engine afterwards contrived by Mr.

Babbage had designed the Analytical Engine with no real prospect of seeing it constructed in his lifetime.

His amazing mind, too, was keen as ever, much like the marvelous Analytical Engine of Charles Babbage, which he greatly admired, if a bit less so having learned that the infamous Professor Moriarty had a hand in the inventor's mathematical logic.