Listen to part of a lecture in a history of science class.

Listen to part of a lecture in a history of science class.

P: The development of computers and the programs needed to run them truly took off after about the 1950s and there are now countless software programs to make computers carry out different tasks. But you might be surprised to learn that the first computer program was written in 1843 by a woman named Ada Lovelace.Lovelace was the daughter of the English poet Lord Byron. Now, in addition to being famous for his poetry, Byron was also known for erratic moods and unpredictable behaviors, and he separated from Lovelace’s mother only a few months after their daughter, Ada, was born. Lovelace his mother thought that the pursuit of knowledge was essential to an individual's development. She was highly educated herself, and she insisted that her daughter be tutored in mathematics and science from a young age.Well, Lovelace quickly showed her proclivity for mathematics, and at the age of 17, she met a mathematician named Charles Babbage. Babbage acted as a mentor to Lovelace for years. When they met, he'd been building a highly innovative machine that was intended to do something like what modern day calculators do-- automate calculation.But this machine's capabilities would be relatively limited to equations based on addition, but eventually, and note, we're only talking about the mid 1830s here, Babbage turned his thoughts toward a new machine that would be even more sophisticated in concept, a computer, the Analytical Engine. The analytical engine was designed to do more complex calculations, more advanced equations, multiplication and division, for instance, the machine would be a huge and complex mechanical system of gears, levers, rods and other moving parts corresponding to numerical digits.Babbage's plan was to feed punched cards into it, cards with patterns of holes punched into them, kind of similar to ones used for years with computers in the 20th century, depending on the pattern on the cards, different parts of the machine would be engaged. Machine would be engaged. The punch cards would provide the directions. In other words, the Analytical Engine could be programmed.Lovelace studied Babbage's plans in depth, and in 1840 after Babbage made a presentation on it, another mathematician, Luigi Manabrea, published a paper describing the Analytical Engine in detail. Now Manabrea wrote his paper in French, and Lovelace was asked to translate the paper from French to English. What she did, however, was more than that.She added seven lengthy notes to Manabrea's paper. The notes made the published paper three times longer than the original. Most important in these notes, she proposes how the Analytical Engine could be programmed. Lovelace described, for example, how the Analytical Engine could switch to one set of instructions or another depending on predetermined sets of conditions. You know, if X then Y. Another thing she described was what today is called looping, a way to repeat a series of instructions over and over.She realized also that the engine could manipulate not just numbers, but symbols, and symbolic logic is what underpins modern computer programming. She even speculated on whether the machine could make decisions on its own based on data it generated, use its own data to make decisions that are, you know, in a sense, independent. In other words, she theorized about capabilities that we call artificial intelligence, some of which have been achieved today, but Lovelace ruled out this idea, arguing that a machine could only do what it was ordered to perform.Furthermore, Lovelace wrote out actual instructions for the Analytical Engine to perform complex calculations. In other words, she'd written the very first computer program. Normally, these calculations would be laborious to do by hand, but the Analytical Engine would, in theory, complete them automatically, following the instructions she had written. Now I say in theory because, well, the analytical end was never actually built, so Lovelace never had the chance to test her program on it.As a result, her legacy was largely forgotten until the 1950s and developments in computing happened independently of her work. But when her notes were rediscovered in the mid-20th century, there was no doubt that her vision was truly revolutionary, although people didn't take advantage of Lovelace's programming, many of her ideas are realized in modern day computing.