Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a day of blogging to draw attention to the achievements of women in science and technology. I'm not sure exactly how long Ada Lovelace Day has been around, but I do remember my brief yet fascinating study in 1989 of the machines she programmed - the Analytical Engine of Charles Babbage. As a student of electrical/computer engineering, I also studied the history of technology and its impact on western culture. This excellent course, instructed by Dr. John Lienhard at the University of Houston, gave me some perspective on the social consequences of technology. It also required me to write some papers, and for one I chose Babbage's Analytical Engine.
Today computers are all around us - in our cars, phones, hospital equipment, weather monitoring, flight control, music and video systems, and of course web servers. Many people, like me, program them for a living. As a student, I was amazed to discover that over a century before all our electronic advances produced what we thought was the first computer, Ada Lovelace was programming a mechanical device not unlike a modern computer.
In honor of that achievement I'm putting my paper, The Philosophy of Babbage's Analytical Engine, online. The paper shows how the philosophy of operation of the Analytical Engine is similar to that of a modern computer, and also contains a nice quote from Ada Lovelace - who like Babbage was way ahead of her time. I hope the paper conveys the depth of understanding that would be required to program such a device.
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