Today is Ada Lovelace Day. Who’s that? Just the first computer programmer. Ever. Lovelace’s friend Charles Babbage designed a concept for a machine he called the “Analytical Engine” – essentially a mechanical computer that would have relied on punch cards to run programs. He recruited Lovelace to translate some notes from one of his lectures, but while Lovelace was translating she added to the notes herself.
The notes grew to three times their original length, as Lovelace described what many call the first computer program. Because of funding issues, the machine was not built during her and Babbage’s lifetimes.
But Lovelace’s published article on the Analytical Engine later became a source of inspiration for Alan Turing’s work to build the first modern computers in the 1940s.