The Store was where numbers were
held, and the Mill was where they were ???woven??? into new results. In a modern computer these same parts are
called the memory unit and the central processing unit (CPU).
Perhaps the key concept that separated the analytical engine from its predecessors was that it supported
conditional program execution. This allows the machine to determine what to do next, based upon a condition
or situation that is detected at the very moment the program is running.
Figure 1-3 Jacquard Loom Cards, photograph by Doug Jones
(http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/cards/history.html).
Augusta Ada Byron, the countess of Lovelace, was a mathematician who worked with Charles Babbage on
his analytical engine. Unlike Babbage, who was interested in building a computing device, Lovelace sought to
understand and reason about methods for computing. She studied these methods, their implementations, and the
properties of their implementations. Lovelace even developed a program that would have been able to compute
the Bernoulli numbers. (Bernoulli numbers comprise a sequence of rational numbers that have many roles in
mathematics and number theory.)
In her published analysis of the analytical engine, Lovelace outlined the fundamentals of computer
programming, including looping and memory addressing.
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