Ada Lovelace – The Worlds First Programmer
The worlds first programmer Ada Lovelace is widely believed to hold this title due to her notes on the first algorithm carried out by a machine. However at the time her work was largely overshadowed by well renowned friend and colleague Charles Babbage who is credited with creating the worlds first computer.
Ada was born to poet George Gordon and mathematics loving wife Annabella Milbanke. Fearing Ada would inherit her fathers volatile poetic temperament, her mother raised her under a strict regimen of science , logic and mathematics. In 1833 Ada was introduced to Charles Babbage. Ada was deeply intrigued by Babbage’s plans for a complicated device he called the analytical engine. It was never built but the design had all the elements of a modern computer.
In 1842 Ada translated a short article describing the analytical engine by Italian Mathematician Luigi Menabrea for publication in England. Babbage asked her to explain the article as she understood the machine so well. The final article is over three times the length of the orginal and contains several early computer programs as well as strikingly prescient observations on the potential uses of the machine including manipulation of symbols and creation of music.
Although Babbage and his assistants had sketched out programs for his engine previously, Ada’s are the most elaborate and complete, and the first to be published so she is often referred to as the worlds first computer programmer.
Sadly Ada died of cancer aged 36 a few years after the publication of ‘Sketch of the Analytical engine with notes from the translator’
Ada’s notes became one of the most critical documents to inspire Alan turnings work on the first modern computers in the 1940’s
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