Charles Babbage Charles Babbage Charles Babbage (; 26 December 1791 – 18 October 1871) was an English polymath. A mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer, Babbage originated the concept of a digital programmable computer. Considered by some to be a "father of the computer", Babbage is credited with inventing the first mechanical computer that eventually led to more complex electronic designs, though all the essential ideas of modern computers are to be found in Babbage's analytical engine. His varied work in other fields has led him to be described as "pre-eminent" among the many polymaths of his century. Parts of Babbage's incomplete
Florida Automatic Computer had an operational uptime of about 90%. Other features of the computer included insertion of short words, automatic truncation, automatic zero suppression, automatic scaling, and printed format control. FLAC I was housed in a three-story wooden building south of the cafeteria at PAFB, while the two FLAC II systems were built in the South Wing of the Tech Lab in summer and fall of 1956. FLAC II abandoned mercury delay line memory in favor of a faster and more versatile 4096-word magnetic core memory. The FLAC machines' service life ended in 1960, whereupon they were replaced by IBM 709 scientific