Science

T-REXXERS in a Past Life

By Mila Golubov
Ada Lovelace was, indeed, a trexxer before her time. Lady Lovelace, the only daughter of Lord Byron, was an opium addict, a gambler, and arguably the first ever programmer. She saw the art as well as the science in programming, and she wrote eloquently about it. Though not given as much acknowledgement as her male counterparts, Lady Lovelace was truly a pioneer.

Ada was a mathematical prodigy, whose mother attempted to cure her of decidedly unfeminine interest in the sciences with healthy doses of laudanum-laced "tonic". Despite this discouragement, Ada continued her associations with like-minded colleagues like logician Augustus De Moran. She then, underwent a mentorship under Charles Babbage, after he came to the house to demonstrate his Difference Engine. Ada was drawn to the new technology at first sight. And she began to work with Babbage on a long planned, but never constructed Analytical Engine.

Babbage has been celebrated by many as the force behind the hardware of first protocomputer, but it was Ada that created the software. As a mathematician, she saw that the Analytical Engine's possibilities extended far beyond its original purpose of calculating mathematical and navigational tables. Her foresight surpassed even that of Babbage.

When Charles Babbage returned from a speaking tour on the Continent, Ada translated the extensive notes taken by one Count Manabrea in Italy and composed an addendum nearly three times as long as the original text. Her published notes are particularly poignant to programmers, who can see how truly ahead of her time she was.
Prof. B. H. Newman wrote in the Mathematical Gazette that her observations "show her to have fully understood the principles of a programmed computer a century before its time."

Among her programming innovations for a machine that would never be realizing in her lifetime were the subroutine (a set of reusable instructions), looping (running a useful set of instructions over and over) and the conditional jump (branching to specified instructions if a particular condition is satisfied).

Ada died at age thirty-six years old, but her legacy lives on as the namesake of the government's computer language. In the late 1970s, the Pentagon selected for its own a specially constructed "superlanguage," known only as the "green language" (three competitors were assigned the names "red," "blue" and "yellow") until it was officially named after Ada Lovelace. Ada became a registered trademark of the United States Department of Defense.

For more of history’s great computer eccentrics: http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/