Tech Fad

The first computer programmer was a woman
In 1843, Ada Lovelace, a British mathematician, published an English translation of an Analytical Engine article written by Luigi Menabrea, an Italian engineer. To her translation, she added her own extensive notes.In one of her notes, she described an algorithm for the Analytical Engine to compute Bernoulli numbers. Since the algorithm was considered to be the first specifically written for implementation on a computer, she has been cited as the first computer programmer.

Did Lovelace go onto a life of Ted Talks (or whatever the Victorian equivalent was)? Sadly not, she died at the age of 36, but her legacy thankfully lives on.

The first “pre-computers” were powered by steam
In 1801, a French weaver and merchant, Joseph Marie Jacquard, invented a power loom that could base the design of a fabric upon punched wooden cards.Fast forward to the 1830s, and the world marvelled at a device large as a house and powered by six steam engines. It was invented by Charles Babbage, the father of computing – and he called it the Analytic Engine.

Babbage used punch cards to allow the monstrous machine to be programmable. The machine consisted of four parts: The mill (analogous to CPU), the store (analogous to memory and storage), the reader (input) and the printer (output).

It is the reader that makes the Analytic Engine innovative. Using the card-reading technology of the Jacquard loom, three different punched cards were used: Operation cards, number cards and variable cards.

Who says technology and geek stuff is boring?