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
Digital electronic computer machines for computation and communicating using natural language. A digital computer can perform its operations in the decimal system, in binary, in ternary or in other numeral systems. As of 2014, all digital electronic computers commonly used, whether personal computers or supercomputers, are working in the binary number system and also use binary logic. A few ternary computers using ternary logic were built mainly in the Soviet Union as research projects. A digital electronic computer is not necessarily a transistorized computer: before the advent of the transistor, computers used vacuum tubes. The transistor enabled electronic computers to become much more