ABSTRACT
Charles Babbage invented two calculating machines, the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine. Of the two, the Difference Engine was, historically and technically, the less interesting—;;although it was the machine that came closest to actually being built. Babbage never built a full-scale Difference Engine because in 1833 he abandoned it for a new invention, the Analytical Engine, the chief work on which his fame in the history of computing rests. The most important analog computing technology of the nineteenth century, from an economic perspective, was the mechanical tide predictor. One of the first advocates of the team computing approach was the Englishman Lewis Fry Richardson, who pioneered numerical meteorology—;;the application of numerical techniques to weather forecasting. Richardson had designed his weather-forecasting factory around a team of human computers because it was the only practical digital computing technique he knew about, based on what he had learned of the working methods of the Nautical Almanac Office.
