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First Computer Programmer From 1800s
First Computer Programmer From 1800s
She wrote all of these mathematicians and scientists of her day into corresponding with her
giving her lessons, but ultimately, yeah, she was an autodidact. She read everything she coul
get her hands on, she kept up-to-date with all the scientific publications of her day, she
corresponded with people that she admired, and she organized little scientific salons in her
immediate social circles. So she taught herself everything she knew. And she ended up spend
her life developing mathematical proofs for the earliest computer. In fact, before computers
were even built, she made mathematical proofs that can be characterized as the earliest
computer programs for a machine called the difference engine and then the analytical engin
So Ada Lovelace's primary contribution to the history of computer science is a set of notes th
she wrote that were footnotes of the translation of a paper written about Charles Babbage's
analytical engine, which was a machine that he was having a really hard time getting funded
the British government. He traveled around Europe giving talks about the machine. One of t
people that saw one of those talks was a young Italian engineer named L. F. Menabrea, who
ended up becoming the Prime Minister of Italy. He wrote a technical paper about the analyti
engine that was published in a Swiss journal. Ada read it. She thought it was pretty good. Bu
she thought she could do better.
She showed it to Babbage, and she said, "Couldn't I do better than this?", basically. She ende
up creating a volume of notes that ended up being several times more voluminous than the
original paper. She made a massive jump that wasn't really recognized until the 1950s, the
dawn of the computing age. A number of computer scientists rediscovered her notes and
republished them because they had essentially predicted everything that they were doing in
early days of computing. We have to actively make sure that we develop our own history and
keep it updated and maintain it and open it up to as many people as possible.