ning. Not to the exclu- sion of others, but this one is really terrific. Raring remarks that Lady Lovelace wrote in her memoir the following (17]: The Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. -Countess of Lovelace, Translator's Notes.... 184

Mechanical, hand-cranked calculators appeared in the mid-18" century, and in 1886 Charles Babbage conceived the first programmable computing machine, The Analytical Engine. It was designed to read programs from cards, and used cogs and wheels to perform the calculations. His first machine - The Difference Engine — was d