An early calculator designed by Charles Babbage and subsidized by the British government. Employing wheels and rods, which others had experimented with earlier, the project was started in 1821 but ...

Difference Engine A numerical table is a tool designed to save the time and labor of those engaged in computing work. The oldest tables which are preserved, were compiled in Babylon in the period 1800 ...

When I was in college, several decades ago, I relied heavily on a computational device called a slide rule and on a little, paperbound handbook of mathematical and scientific tables. I occasionally ...

This is a working Difference Engine No. 2 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. Charles Babbage designed a Difference Engine, which is one of the earliest computation machines — some ...

British researchers are about to spend 10 years and millions of dollars to build a pretty crappy computer, reports the New York Times. The device is slow and humongous -- the opposite of we would look ...

Charles Babbage is widely recognized for inventing the first mechanical computer, the Difference Engine, in 1821. However, he never managed to build any of his many designs. Pehr-Georg Scheutz, a ...

The Babbage Engine Exhibit opens May 10 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. The central artifact of the exhibit, a faithful construction of Englishman Charles Babbage's Difference ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I focus on the intersection of games and technology. This photo depicts a section of the "Difference Engine," a mechanical ...

Nineteenth-century computer pioneer Charles Babbage is taken back—via Lego. Andy Carroll, an apparently highly-skilled Lego builder and mathematician, created this functional mechanical computer, ...

Conventional gaming wisdom holds that World of Warcraft is such a lean, mean GPU-conserving machine that it will run on everything from a 386 to a scientific calculator from the early 1970s. Rumor has ...