Ada Lovelace Quotes
The Analytical Engine has no pretentions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis, but it had no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths.
The Computer was invented and fabricated by Charles Babbage and was called an “Analytical Engine” by him.
Ada Lovelace, 1815–1852, English Countess 7 Mathematician, Inventor of Computer Programming and First Computer Programmer, Daughter of Lord Byron, “Notes” to her manual of instructions for programming the first programmable computer, This statement was named “Lady Lovelace’s Objection” by Alan Turing and has been a position that has been restated and accepted by most computer experts as applying to all computers. However, at the end of the 20th century some programmers had found ways to instruct computers to learn and there were then serious questions of whether computers were capable of originality and the science fiction dreamers who had doubted the eventual validity of Lady Lovelace’s Objection were then joined by some serious scientists.]
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Many of the male mathematicians were already working for the military or defense industries or still in military service. The University Of Pennsylvania Moore School of Engineering was working on trying to design and build a programmable computer that was to be the ENIAC computer. This was one of the very early computer development projects and mathematicians were desired to write the programs to control the computers and make them do something. But at the time, ironically, male mathematicians and engineers, wanted to design and build the computers—all of the early computers were built in a laboratory by scientists and engineers not by workers in a factory. Those were the prestigious and “interesting” jobs. Doing the programming most men assumed would be uninteresting, scut work, and so this project, out of desperation, came up with the radical idea of using women. And so the first computer programmers were mostly women. The irony was that once it became clear how creative and exciting computer programming could be, and its critical importance, the men flooded into the field and a decade later almost everyone thought that computer programming was a man’s profession, and there was a very common bias that women would not make good programmers. However, the people (men) who thought that did not know that the first computer programmer was a woman—Ada Lovelace {641640} and the earliest programming pioneers in America were mostly women.
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. She was the first to recognise that the machine had applications beyond pure calculation, and to have published the first algorithm intended to be carried out by such a machine. As a result, she is often regarded as one of the first computer programmers.
