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Many stereotypes today portray computer programming as a job for males, which is really quite a shame
considering the person credited as being the first computer programmer was a female! Of course it took
a woman’s intuition to first develop a scientific way of computing. Will you be willing to follow in
her footsteps and make new discoveries of your own? Ada Byron (1815-1852) was the daughter of a poet, but never met her father and so was raised by her
mother, who made sure her daughter had extensive schooling in math and science for a girl of that time.
Intellectual pursuits were not encouraged for females in Ada’s day, but when her friend Charles Babbage
came up with the idea for a new calculating machine, the Analytical Engine, how could she resist the
new challenges and excitement of a computer that could do things that nobody in the world had been
able to do before? Ada attained her fame from writing a series of notes of Babbage’s computer in 1842-1843. She understood the workings of the machine as well as Babbage, but she was better at articulating its capabilities and its future promise. Her notes anticipated future developments, including computer-generated music, and also included the first computer program: a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers with the Engine. |
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Biographers debate on whether Ada actually wrote the program by herself or whether Babbage led a helping
hand in its development, but either way, Ada’s contributions are monumental. And besides, teamwork and
gaining new insights from others as you work on a problem are some of the most fun parts of writing a
program!
See the Next story: Grace Hopper |