This is irrelevant to the argument of the author, the analytical engine would have been a computer capable of being programmed. It was the idea of a computer.

The difference machine is not a computer, as it exists to perform a specific fixed algorithm.

The author also argues in his other article that he linked to that Claude Shannon actually invented Boolean logic (which is misnamed, because what Boole invented is not what's today called by this name). Well, the problem is that I've seen scans of books on mathematical logic printed in the 1910s and 1920s, and they are pretty much the same as today, except maybe with less emphasis on Hilbert's axioms, but the truth tables, the AND/OR/NOT trinity, de Morgan's laws ― it's all there already.

So, if Shannon was not aware of all that work and had to reinvent it on his own, do we really credit him with this invention?

>but the truth tables, the AND/OR/NOT trinity, de Morgan's laws ― it's all there already.

Yes, the idea of algebraizing logic was to my knowledge first done by Frege in his 1884 book "Begriffsschrift" (Hard to translate, maybe "Statement Notation" gets close?), which is fascinating to read. He had developed a (from our perspective) very weird notation, but it actually expresses what we would nowadays call "formal logic". Importantly it includes decuctions, which is an important addition to the and/or/not operations.

Before Frege philosophy/mathematics also had these notions, but instead of being algebraic they were linguistic notions. Those you can find even in ancient Greek Texts.

If the author really does argue that Shannon invented formal logic, then he is definitely wrong, although I have not read his argument on that.

But notably, Babbage never built one of his designs, nor ever saw one working.