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Comment by elcapitan | Hacker News Reader

Babbage invented the concept of the programmable computer, Zuse built a programmable electronic computer, which could later be shown to be turing-complete. Those things are pretty subtle, and the 'national' version is always the least subtle, I guess ;)

Leonardo da Vinci also invented tanks and helicopters, and then it took a couple of hundred years to build some.

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And Pascal invented the calculator

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_calculator

Slight difference - da Vinci's tanks and helicopters wouldn't actually have worked, whereas the Analytical Engine absolutely would have.

"Absolutely would have worked" is probably the closest you can get to modern software development ;)

Or more seriously put: It's a concept for a machine with 55k moving parts and powered by a steam engine. "Would work" is probably a bold statement considering how far off theoretical designs always are from the engineering reality, by all experience.

http://plan28.org/

"We have been pecking away at Babbage’s original design drawings for some while now and have found with regret that we are unable to reverse engineer a coherent and consistent understanding of the Analytical Engine from the mechanical drawings alone. "

http://blog.plan28.org/2016/05/spring-2016-report-to-compute...

If you read further, it becomes pretty clear that it's more or less a theoretical idea. A great one though, granted.

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