
The legacy of Ada Lovelace (2015) - mxschumacher
https://www.1843magazine.com/intelligence/cracking-coder
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Animats
Not really that influential in the early years of computing, though. As with
Turing, she came to popular attention long after the technology had progressed
beyond her point.

(The real history of early computing is more like "OK, we can do arithmetic
and logic with gears, relays, or tubes, but we need a cheaper memory device."
Memory devices were a long struggle in early computing. Things tried in the
early years: lots of tubes (huge and very expensive per bit), paper tape
(slow), mechanical wheels (expensive and very slow), rotating wheels of
capacitors (small), mercury delay lines (messy, hard to keep in sync,
temperature dependent, slow), magnostrictive delay lines (same problems as
mercury delay lines but less messy), Williams electrostatic storage CRTs
(expensive, but the first real random-access device), magnetic drums (slow),
magnetic tape(slow, but big), and finally magnetic core memory (fast, random
access, but expensive). Then came RAM, and 128 bits per chip, and 1K per chip,
and 4K per chip, and 16K per chip, and 64K per chip...)

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acqq
If you are interested in the subject and also like good comics, there's an
amazing book:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thrilling_Adventures_of_Lo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thrilling_Adventures_of_Lovelace_and_Babbage)

The Introduction:

"Lovelace– The Origin"

[http://sydneypadua.com/2dgoggles/lovelace-the-
origin-2/](http://sydneypadua.com/2dgoggles/lovelace-the-origin-2/)

The book also has a lot of real historical information, nicely interwoven in
the comics with the footnotes and end-notes, and they are a joy to read too.

~~~
telesilla
I've literally just finished reading this today. Wonderful book, beautifully
made. Now we just need a broadway opera on the subject.

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ruricolist
Stephen Wolfram's post about Ada Lovelace:

[http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/untangling-the-
tale-o...](http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/untangling-the-tale-of-ada-
lovelace/)

Is actually surprisingly substantive, and addresses (among other things) the
correspondence between Lovelace and Babbage while she was working on the
Appendix.

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VladKovac
Actually we do have _real_ female computer heroines like Grace Hopper which
will do just fine.

~~~
dnautics
Lovelace's algorithms were only first published in 1953, so empirically
speaking she is very little more than a symbol, how to do these things were
already reinvented and deployed in common use by then. Computing would have
gotten just fine without her algorithms (but maybe her cheerleading babbage
was important). Hopper's invention of the concept of a compiling language is
arguably huge and she really was the first to do it and obviously it made a
difference.

I would go so far as to say that I suspect the idea of a compiling language
cames more easily from a female perspective than a male perspective of the
era/discipline.

"Nobody believed that I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They
told me computers could only do arithmetic."

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debt
margaret hamilton was another highly influential woman software engineer; she
directed the team of software engineers that wrote on-board flight software
for the apollo missions.

she was just awarded presidential medal of freedom.

interesting article she wrote on the concept of "development before the fact"

[http://www.htius.com/Articles/Inside_DBTF.htm](http://www.htius.com/Articles/Inside_DBTF.htm)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(scientist)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_\(scientist\))

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mathattack
The Computer History Museum in Mountain View has a great exhibit on her.

[http://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/adalovelace/](http://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/adalovelace/)

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Animats
(Duplicated, and I didn't submit it twice. Second time in the last week that's
happened.)

~~~
dang
Sorry; it's a bug that shows up occasionally.

We detached this comment from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13051657](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13051657)
and marked it off-topic.

