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Sunday, June 20, 2021
CONTINUITY: Ada Augusta Lovelace's Bernoulli Numbers—The First Computer Program
This video uses Fourmilab's edition of the Countess of Lovelace's “Sketch of the Analytical Engine” from our Analytical Engine Web resources. Not discussed is the arm-waving in implied by the statement “Here follows a repetition of Operations thirteen to twenty-three.” in the Bernoulli number computation chart. How Babbage intended looping to work in the Analytical Engine was ill-defined, and the Bernoulli number computation makes glaringly evident the need for an index register or indirect addressing to access columns in the Store. This is discussed in my document “Is the Emulator Authentic?”.
Posted at June 20, 2021 13:13