He conceived of programmable computation. Well, the key to operating any computer lies in transmitting sequences of on-off commands. Babbage used Jacquard-style punched cards to do this. The presence or absence of a hole communicated a simple on-off command to the machine. And until only very recently, we still used punched cards to transmit our instructions to computers.
Good ideas turn and change and flow.
This program has been rewritten as Episode 1145 .