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What did Ada Lovelace's program actually do? (2018)
In 1843, Ada Lovelace published the first nontrivial program. How did it work?
There is a great video on YouTube demonstrating a working Difference Engine on loan to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, which is worth watching even just to listen to the marvelous sounds the machine makes while it runs. Her mother, Annabella Milbanke, had decided that a solid grounding in mathematics would ward off the wild, romantic sensibility that possessed Lovelace’s father, Lord Byron, the famous poet. This insight was all the more remarkable given that Menabrea saw the Analytical Engine primarily as a tool for automating “long and arid computation,” which would free up the intellectual capacities of brilliant scientists for more advanced thinking.
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