The Origin of Modern Computing

[DeanStephen]

Ada Lovelace was Lord Byron’s only legitimate child.

[bryanjacla]

Nvidia honored her by naming their latest generation of GPUs Lovelace Architecture

[bartsanders]

How it started: "I'll assemble these gears in such a manner as to eliminate errors."

How it's going: "Strawberry has two r's."

[Ubu]

Her name was Ada King (née Byron.) 'Lovelace' was her title, not her surname! Her full title was: The Right Honourable Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace.

[rkellerify]

As an exchange officer with the British Army I met and befriended Charles Babbage’s great great grandson. While by no means a “poor officer” he did indicate that Charles had spent all of the considerable family fortune on the failed prefection of his “analytical engine.”

[scottlaplantelaplante]

Back in the 70s, I went to college majoring in computer science and math. We actually learned about this (Babbage and Ada) in some of the intro courses.

[matthewgauthier]

As a tradesman I find it remarkable the knowhow and wherewithal that was used a 180 years ago to even make this machine with such precision, pre industrial revolution, no CNC machines, or computers to aid in that. Amazing. Thanks.

[ulysseesy]

In the Ninteen Fifties my mon worked in accounting at Spaulding Corporation. They used a mechanical computer to do their computations.

[Crusty_Camper]

The mechanical computer is a work of art and mesmerising to watch when it is being operated

[adirondacker]

Ada is also the name of the programming language contracted for development by the Department of Defense in the 1970's in an effort to constrain defense contractors to one language. At the time, there were over 400 often proprietary languages in use by contractors. This guaranteed them follow-on and maintenance contracts on their products. Ada is a strongly typed and robust language that is still in use for safety-critical applications.

[casbot]

There's a alternative history novel, *The Difference Engine, * by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, based on the conceit that Babbage's engine was widely adopted and then the Analytical Engine is developed.
And the computer revolution arrives over a century earlier.

It's the origin of the Steampunk genre, in which clockwork computers are a staple of the settings.

[patrickfreeman]

My dad was a common man with an uncommon gift for math. He once caught a mechanical adding machine make an error.

[NoahSpurrier]

The difference engine is often confused with analytic engine, which was the successor to the difference engine; although it was never completed.

[thefilthyrhombus]

So it's all this guy's fault.

I'm going to build a time machine, go back to 1843, shove any random Twitter thread in this guy's face, and declare, "Behold what your works have wrought BABBAGE! LOOK UPON THEM AND

[flowertrue]

I did a presentation on women in early computer history for my CSC 151 class. When I explained about Ada writing a program to calculate Bernoulli numbers, I ad-libbed, "Whatever those are." Got a laugh out of the audience. A proud moment in my history.

[georget]

the analytical machine has been constructed from the original drawings. There is a video in YT showing it in operation

[SueUTube]

Little known fact. An early error occurred and Babbage said, "that's a software problem."

[shelbybrown]

Always great take
From the history GUY

[ThePlayerOfGames]

Ada Lovelace wrote to Babbage asking for the ability to enhance the programming languages
She became the first software developer, first software designer, and hypothesised many of the functions of non-human computers that would bear fruit in the digital age including wireless communication
Ada's letters to various people including Charles Babbage are still preserved to this day
And "computer" was a job role until c1950's, hence the disambiguations of "mechanical computer", "analogue computer", and "digital computer"

[thealmightyaku-]

The original design called for the Analytical Engine to be powered by a locomotive-scale steam engine.

Awesome.