A fully-functional Babbage Difference Engine? That's been done and duplicated. But the even more ambitious Babbage Analytical Engine? That's another story completely. Devised by mathematician Charles Babbage in the 1830s, the Analytical Engine can be considered to be the first programmable computer -- or at least the first notion of one -- but Babbage's plans for it were never finished, and the device itself (which would fill a room) was never built. That didn't stop computing pioneer Ada Lovelace from designing a programming language for it, though. Now a team of researchers from the Plan 28 group in the UK have begun
