Ada Lovelace
Programming History 101
The Analytical Engine
Analytical Engine created by Charles Babbage.
“The Analytical Engine could be programmed using punched cards like a Jacquard Loom and could multiply and divide as well as add and subtract. In order to perform one of these operations, a section of the machine called the “mill” would rearrange itself into the appropriate configuration, read the operands off of other columns used for data storage, and then write the result back to another column.”
Sketch of The Analytical Engine
“Lovelace appended a series of notes to her translation of Menabrea’s paper that together ran much longer than the original work. It was here that she made her major contributions to computing. In Note A, which Lovelace attached to Menabrea’s initial description of the Analytical Engine, Lovelace explained at some length and often in lyrical language the promise of a machine that could perform arbitrary mathematical operations. She foresaw that a machine like the Analytical Engine wasn’t just limited to numbers and could in fact act on any objects “whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine.”16 She added that the machine might one day, for example, compose music. This insight was all the more remarkable given that Menabrea saw the Analytical Engine primarily as a tool for automating “long and arid computation,” which would free up the intellectual capacities of brilliant scientists for more advanced thinking.17 The miraculous foresight that Lovelace demonstrated in Note A is one major reason that she is celebrated today.”
https://twobithistory.org/2018/08/18/ada-lovelace-note-g.html
‘With notes upon the Memoir by the Translator
ADA AUGUSTA, COUNTESS OF LOVELACE’
