In her recently released book Broad Band, Claire L.

Evans wants readers to learn about wom

who have been forgotten in tech history. Ada Lovelace may not be a household name like Ste
Jobs but she is possibly the first computer programmer. Following is a transcript of the vide
How A Woman From The 1800s Became The First Computer Programmer
Claire L. Evans: Ada Lovelace understood that if you could make a machine that calculate
not just individual numbers but abstract variables that you could use computers to weave
numbers, musical notes, any kind of symbolic language and that it could be applied to really
anything in the way that it is in our modern world.
Ada Lovelace was the daughter of the poet Lord Byron. She was a mathematician in the
Victorian Age, the very first computer programmer. Her father was known as a kind of louch
romantic, you know, a little bit seedy, a little bit crazy, a little bit wild. When he divorced her
mother, she decided that she was going to try to curb out all the romantic tendencies in her
daughter's spirit by teaching her mathematics, rigorously, from a very young age. So she was
instructed in the maths and sciences from childhood, but unfortunately, she retained some o
her father's poetic spirit, so she became fixated with the idea of mathematics as a form of
poetry, and as a metaphysical art in and of itself.

She wrote all of these mathematicians and scientists of her day into corresponding with her
giving her lessons, but ultimately, yeah, she was an autodidact. She read everything she coul
get her hands on, she kept up-to-date with all the scientific publications of her day, she
corresponded with people that she admired, and she organized little scientific salons in her
immediate social circles. So she taught herself everything she knew. And she ended up spend
her life developing mathematical proofs for the earliest computer. In fact, before computers
were even built, she made mathematical proofs that can be characterized as the earliest
computer programs for a machine called the difference engine and then the analytical engin
So Ada Lovelace's primary contribution to the history of computer science is a set of notes th
she wrote that were footnotes of the translation of a paper written about Charles Babbage's
analytical engine, which was a machine that he was having a really hard time getting funded
the British government. He traveled around Europe giving talks about the machine. One of t
people that saw one of those talks was a young Italian engineer named L. F. Menabrea, who
ended up becoming the Prime Minister of Italy. He wrote a technical paper about the analyti
engine that was published in a Swiss journal. Ada read it. She thought it was pretty good. Bu
she thought she could do better.
She showed it to Babbage, and she said, "Couldn't I do better than this?", basically. She ende
up creating a volume of notes that ended up being several times more voluminous than the
original paper. She made a massive jump that wasn't really recognized until the 1950s, the
dawn of the computing age. A number of computer scientists rediscovered her notes and
republished them because they had essentially predicted everything that they were doing in
early days of computing. We have to actively make sure that we develop our own history and
keep it updated and maintain it and open it up to as many people as possible.