Table of Contents of Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage

by Martin F. Johansen, 2013

Full Title

Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage By L. F. Menabrea of Turin, Officer of the Military Engineers from the Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève, October, 1842, No. 82 With notes upon the Memoir by the Translator

Main Parts

The titles in square brackets are my titles. The original notes were without a titles which makes it a bit more difficult to quickly know what is where.

• Menabrea's Memoir - On the Mathematical Principles of the Analytical Engine
• Nota A - [The Nature of the Analytical Engine]
• Nota B - [Store-Mill Architecture]
• Nota C - [Control Flow in Programs]
• Nota D - [Tracing Program Execution]
• Nota E - [Analytical Computation]
• Nota F - [Iteration and Backing Reduce an Infinity of Operations]
• Nota G
  • [Part 1 - Scope of the Analytical Engine]
  • [Part 2 - Programming a Program for Calculating the Numbers of Bernoulli]

Notable Contents

• Fundamental Computer Science
  • Productive Scope of the Analytical Engine (inc. impossibility of AI)
  • Generality of the Analytical Engine (ability to calculate any function)
  • Applicability of the Analytical Engine Beyond Numbers
  • Analysis of memory, speed and size of programs
  • Mathematical Philosophy
• Internal Computer Architecture
  • Memory (called "the Store")
  • Variables
  • Processor (called "the Mill")
  • Instructions (called "card")
  • Programs (called "cards")
  • Sequential Execution
  • Fetch-Execute Cycle
  • Registers inside the Processor (Variables in the Mill)
  • Pointers and Addresses (called "indices of locality")
• Execution Facilities
  • Four Arithmetic Operation by Mechanism
  • Signed Arithmetic
  • Conditional Execution
  • Iteration (called "cycles")
  • Nested Iteration (called "cycles of cycles")
  • Recursion ("cycle of a cycle of a cycle, &c.")
  • Reuse of Functions
• Programming
  • Variable Naming
  • Data Parallelism
  • Optimization of Programs
  • Efficient Ordering of Instructions
  • Programming for Simple Programs

Copyright © 2013, Martin F. Johansen