Ada Lovelace: The First Computer Programmer
Difference Machine
Ada Byron was a teenager when she met Cambridge mathematics professor Charles Babbage, who had invented the Difference Engine, a mechanical computer designed to produce mathematical tables automatically and error-free. Babbage never built the actual machine due to personal setbacks and financing difficulty. By 1834 he had moved on to design his Analytical Engine, the first general purpose computer, which used punch cards for input and output. This machine also lacked financing and was never built. (Babbage's DifferenceEngine was finally constructed in 1985-2002, and it worked.)
Born two centuries ago, Ada Lovelace was a pioneer of computing science. She took part in writing the first published program and was a computing visionary, recognizing for the first time that computers could do much more than just calculations.
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