[fentonc]

I believe his plans did include a general shift function - what he referred to as “stepping” up/down was just shifting by a digit

[Animats]

Right. There's some question as to whether that was seen as a scaling operation or just as part of multiply or divide.[1]

If you can scale into a reasonable range for each data type, you don't need 50 digits. But that's an abstraction which came decades after Babbage.

[1] https://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/cards.html