Apparently it’s Ada Lovelace Day. I wasn’t aware this day existed, but I’m totally for it.
Ada Lovelace was a mathematician living in the early 1800s that is largerly considered to be the first computer programmer. Although computers obviously didn’t exist at the time, Charles Babbage came very close to creating one called the Difference Engine, which was essentially a mechanical calculator. Although the design was solid, he was never able to build it. Eventually he made a design for an even more complex machine, somewhat similar to the computers we have today, called the Analytical Engine. It had the ability to take input via punch-cards, do complex calculations, store some of it in memory, and output data. Although this machine was never built either, Ada Lovelace did write a program for it which would have been able to calculate a sequence of Bernoulli numbers, thus making her the first computer programmer in history.
If you want to read more about her, check out her Wikipedia page.
And if reading all that interested you, there’s a fantastic alternate history novel written by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling called the Difference Engine, that explores what would have happened if Charles Babbage had actually succeeded in building the Difference Engine.
March 24, 2009, 11:38am
