The Economist (US), December 25th, 1999
1884
IT SEEMS curious that Charles Babbage is remembered today as the grandfather of computing, for Babbage never completed a single one of his clunky mechanical calculating machines, and his work was largely forgotten after his death in 1871. It was only with the construction of the first electronic computers in the 1940s, by people who were unaware of Babbage's work, that the ground-breaking nature of that work became apparent. Had Babbage never lived, in other words, the rise of the computer would have happened anyway. That is because today's computers owe their ancestry not to Babbage b...
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