Ask the average CS student to tell you about the history of computing and they’ll probably start with Babbage’s Analytical Engine. Fair enough: our modern conception of a “computer” is strongly linked to the universal Turing machine, which can take a program as input and carry out an arbitrary computation—anything less, we tend to dismiss as a mere “calculator.” Since Babbage was the first to propose a machine with conditional branching (making it Turing complete) it does mark a...
