Ask students if they know who invented the computer. If they don’t know, inform them that, in 1884, Charles Babbage, an English mathematician, tried to build a complicated machine called the “analytical engine.” It was mechanical, rather than electronic, and Babbage never completed it, but computers today are based on many of the principles he used in his design. Your students may be interested to know that, as recently as forty years ago, computers were so large that they filled whole rooms. They were so complicated that only specially trained people were able to use them.