Simulator of Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine

This package contains a Java simulator for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, a mechanical computer first described in the 1830s.

The original source code was written by John Walker, and is available from this website. That software is in the public domain, according to this website.

This file was last updated on January 31, 2014.

Copyright license

This package is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3. For more information, see the file LICENSE in this directory.

Getting started

This project uses Maven for build management and requires Java 1.8 to compile and run.

To package this project into a JAR file, run

mvn package

This produces an executable JAR file in the target/ directory.

To compile this project, run

mvn compile

To test this project, run

mvn test

To get project reports and development information, run

mvn site

You can then view the site by opening target/site/index.html in a web browser.

Running the Analytical Engine

To create a shell script that runs the simulator, run

mvn clean package jar:jar appassembler:assemble

Then, to run the simulator on a file named myprogram.ae, run

sh target/appassembler/bin/analyticalengine myprogram.ae

Writing programs for the Analytical Engine

The programming language for this machine is arcane, but relatively similar to modern machine languages. For more information on the instruction set and how to write programs for this machine, see this website.

Development

To prepare this package for development in Eclipse, run

mvn eclipse:eclipse -DdownloadSources=true -DdownloadJavadocs=true

and

mvn eclipse:configure-workspace -Declipse.workspace=/path/to/workspace

where /path/to/workspace is the path to your Eclipse workspace.

Eclipse automatic source formatting rules can be found in formatter.xml in the top-level directory of this project.

To use Checkstyle, the Maven Checkstyle plugin, or the Eclipse Checkstyle plugin, use the checkstyle.xml file in the top-level directory of this project.

Contact

Jeffrey Finkelstein jeffrey.finkelstein@gmail.com