In my 2023 article on the evolution of the calculator , I griped about the way we teach the history of computers. I felt that we’re giving far too much credit to Charles Babbage. We have known how to make mechanical calculators at least since the 17th century; the concept of programmable machinery predated the English polymath’s writings by a wide margin, too. The remaining bottleneck was mostly technological: past a very modest scale, sprockets and cams made it too cumbersome to shuffle data back and forth inside a sufficiently complex computing machine. The breakthrough was an electronically-controlled data register. These circuits allowed computation results to be locked in place and then effortlessly routed where needed, no matter how complex and sprawling the overall design. In contrast to the musings of Mr. Babbage, the history of this “working memory” has gotten less attention than it deserves.…