WHO WAS ADA LOVELACE Ada King Countess of Lovelace was an English mathematician She wrote a program that could have been carried out by an early form of computer Therefore she is considered by many to be the first computer programmer Computers are machines that work with information This information can be in the form of Ada King Countess of Lovelace wrote programs for an early form of computer Her computer programs were the first ones ever to be published 4 CHAPTER ONE
WHO WAS ADA LOVELACE numbers words pictures movies or sounds Computer information is also called data Computers can work with huge amounts of data and produce results very quickly They also store and display data An English inventor and mathematician named Charles Babbage dreamed up the first computer in the 1830s Babbage’s machine did not run on electricity like today’s computers computers because scientists did not yet know how electricity Charles Babbage developed plans for the first computer in the mid-1830s He designed it to be able to perform any arithmetic operation Vocabulary A PROGRAM is a set of step-by-step instructions that tell a computer to do something with data 5
ADA LOVELACE Quick Fact In 1855 a Swedish company made a calculator based on Babbage’s machine but the modern electronic computer was not developed until much later worked Instead Babbage’s machine called for more than fifty thousand moving parts It was so complicated that the machine was never constructed constructed during Babbage’s lifetime But it is still considered considered to be the first computer Ada Lovelace created a set of commands that would have worked on Babbage’s machine had it ever been built Only a small part of Babbage’s computer was built during his lifetime The machine was designed to follow instructions that people entered using punched cards 6
CHAPTER TWO A YOUNG MATHEMATICIAN Ada was born on December 10 1815 in what is now London England Her birth name was Augusta Ada Byron She was the daughter of the famous poet Lord Byron and Annabella Milbanke Byron Ada’s first name Augusta was the name of Lord Byron’s half-sister Lord Byron’s first collection of poetry was made public in 1807 when he was nineteen years old The long poem that would make him famous was published five years later in 1812 Almost overnight the twenty-four-year-old twenty-four-year-old Lord Byron found himself in the spotlight Byron 7
