Monday, March 10, 2008

Science and History podcast- Ada Lovelace

Ada Lovelace;

Deep in the heart of the Pentagon is a network of computers. They control the US military, the most powerful army on the planet, and are in turn controlled by a programming language called Ada.

It’s named after Ada Lovelace, the allegedly hard drinking 19th century mathematician and daughter of Lord Byron. In her work with Charles Babbage on a steam driven calculating machine, Ada understood, perhaps before anyone else, what a computer might truly be.

Ada Lovelace has been called many things - the first computer programmer and a prophet of the computer age – but most poetically perhaps by Babbage himself as an ‘enchantress of numbers’.


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