Babbage and Lovelace had all the key ideas for the modern computer in the 1820’s, but it wasn’t until the 1890 census that somebody wanted to pay for such a thing.
I’m not sure that’s true. One of my friends, for a history of computing course in university, took a deep dive into Babbage’s designs for the difference and analytical engines, and concluded that they weren’t actually all that much like modern (Von Neumann) computing devices at all. The limiting factor on Babbage’s machines was not the fact that nobody wanted to pay for them, but that the necessary precision in manufacturing gears had not yet been achieved. The analytical engine, especially, required thousands of very small and precisely machined gears, and the manufacturing technology for them would not be invented until well into the 20th century.
The tabulators used in the 1890 census were a far cry from anything that Babbage designed. The Census tabulators were, more or less, very fancy sorting and counting machines. They could not do math or logical operations, but they could take a large amount of data, sort it by various fields and count how many records had the given field marked. They made no attempt at generality (unlike Babbage’s inventions and later computers), but instead sought to mechanize one or two algorithms for maximum efficiency.
I’m not sure that’s true. One of my friends, for a history of computing course in university, took a deep dive into Babbage’s designs for the difference and analytical engines, and concluded that they weren’t actually all that much like modern (Von Neumann) computing devices at all. The limiting factor on Babbage’s machines was not the fact that nobody wanted to pay for them, but that the necessary precision in manufacturing gears had not yet been achieved. The analytical engine, especially, required thousands of very small and precisely machined gears, and the manufacturing technology for them would not be invented until well into the 20th century.
The tabulators used in the 1890 census were a far cry from anything that Babbage designed. The Census tabulators were, more or less, very fancy sorting and counting machines. They could not do math or logical operations, but they could take a large amount of data, sort it by various fields and count how many records had the given field marked. They made no attempt at generality (unlike Babbage’s inventions and later computers), but instead sought to mechanize one or two algorithms for maximum efficiency.