Ada – an 1800’s woman or a programming language?

A woman programmer in the 1800’s? They didn’t even have what we know today as computers, how could a programmer exist? What were they programming?

Let me introduce you to a woman who I recently have been made aware of, Ada Lovelace. Her legal name was Augusta Ada Byron but she also went byAda King, Countess of Lovelace or Lady Byron. Born in December of 1815, to the poet “Lord Byron,” whom she never knew due to her parents separation when she was two months of age.

Although it was very common that the male counterpart would receive custody of the child, Lord Byron made no attempt but had requested to be kept updated throughout her life. He had left Britain all together and resided in Greece until his death. Lady Annabella Byron, steered Ada into a studies of mathematics and science to develop a sense of logic and not of literary tales and “insanity” like her father. Despite her mother’s attempts, Ada still held great fondness for her father.

In Ada’s childhood she became very ill and in 1829 had been rendered paralyzed from a bout of the measles. After some years she was able to regain her strength and could walk with crutches. Though her illness might have physically altered her life, her pursuit of knowledge in technology and mathematics still held strong.

She had many tutors to whom she took a liking to and made an attempt to elope with one of them in 1833. That was squandered by her mother and a new tutor was added, Mary Somerville. Somerville introduced Ada, age 18, to Charles Babbage in 1833. From there Ada and Babbage worked side by side until Ada’s death in 1852.

Babbage was an known as eccentric and from my findings, somewhat of a crotchety character. He was the inventor and creator of the Difference Engine, which we know a variation of today as a calculator. In the mid 1830s he developed plans for, what is known as, the Analytical Engine. The Analytical Engine was envisioned to perform any arithmetic operation on the basis of instructions that were obtained by punch cards. There was a memory unit that stored numbers, the sequential control and many of the very basic elements of the present-day computer. Fun fact: The memory unit of this engine could hold 1,000 50-digit numbers, which was larger than any storage of an actual computer built before 1960. In 1843, Ada translated a French paper that was written about the Analytical Engine and with her own annotations published her theories of how the Analytical Engine could perform a sequence of calculations, after being programmed to do so with the convergence of technology of the Jacquard loom. Because of this, Ada is now known as the first computer programmer.

Unfortunately, that particular Analytical Engine was never completed due to his death in 1871. It was never completely finished. British scientists however, found Babbage’s unpublished notebooks and built a Difference Engine No. 2 to Babbage’s specifications in 1991.

Today Ada is known as a programming language that is still used within industries such as defense, aviation and finance.

How incredible is all of this? I found it to be extremely interesting and insightful knowing how brilliant some minds are. I hope you found it as interesting as I did.

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