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 and the computer used 19 total instructions and three-address code instruction type. All numbers were scaled to less than 1 in absolute value. It had built-in automatic decimal-to-binary and binary-to-decimal number conversion that worked at 500 words/second. The system clock ran at 1 MHz. Addition operations took, on average, 850 microseconds, whereas multiplications and divisions took 3300 microseconds. The system used both a 512-word mercury delay line and magnetic tape for memory, and for data input, the system was equipped to process Flexowriter paper tape (at a rate of 1 word/second), magnetic wire (40 words/second), Raytheon magnetic tape (250 words/second),