Work begins on Babbage’s Analytical Engine

Work has gotten underway on Plan 28, a project to create Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, the never-built successor to the Difference Engine. The Analytical Engine was to have been a general purpose computer, and Ada Lovelace designed the first-ever programming language to run on it. Many factors led to its never being completed — the state of the art in precision engineering in Babbage’s day, finance woes, and so forth.