begin partial quote of:
First computer program
Lovelace's diagram from Note G, the first published computer algorithm
In 1840, Babbage was invited to give a seminar at the
University of Turin about his Analytical Engine.
Luigi Menabrea, a young Italian engineer, and the future
Prime Minister of Italy wrote up Babbage's lecture in
French, and this transcript was subsequently published in the
Bibliothèque universelle de Genève in October 1842. Babbage's friend
Charles Wheatstone
commissioned Ada Lovelace to translate Menabrea's paper into English.
She then augmented the paper with notes, which were added to the
translation. Ada Lovelace spent the better part of a year doing this,
assisted with input from Babbage. These notes, which are more extensive
than Menabrea's paper, were then published in Taylor's
Scientific Memoirs under the
initialism AAL.
Ada Lovelace's notes were labelled alphabetically from A to G. In note G, she describes an
algorithm for the Analytical Engine to compute
Bernoulli numbers.
It is considered the first published algorithm ever specifically
tailored for implementation on a computer, and Ada Lovelace has often
been cited as the first computer programmer for this reason.
[67][68] The engine was never completed so her program was never tested.
In 1953, more than a century after her death, Ada Lovelace's notes on
Babbage's Analytical Engine were republished. The engine has now been
recognised as an early model for a computer and her notes as a
description of a computer and software.
[62]
end quote.
She was the first (or one of the first) to see the potential for today's computers. What is amazing about her vision of this was this is 1840!
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