This is a replica of the original analytical engine. When Charles Babbage designed the Analytical Engine in the middle of the nineteenth century, the
technology of choice was mechanical, so his Analytical Engine used gears and shafts, like a
gigantic clock, to store and process information. The Analytical Engine was never completed,
partly because of engineering problems but mostly because Babbage ran out of money. A model
of the Analytical Engine languished in pieces in the British Museum for more than a century.
The organization of the Analytical Engine is, in its broad outlines, virtually identical to that of modern computers. Almost universally, the architecture of a computer today consists of an input section, a central processor that performs arithmetic and logical operations dictated by a program of instructions, a memory unit to store information, and an output section to make the results available to the user, exactly as described by Babbage a century ago.