Ada Lovelace in her own words

by Ursula Martin, University of Oxford

Charles Babbage invented wonderful computing machines. But he was not very good at explaining things. That's where Ada Lovelace came in. She is famous for writing a paper in 1843 explaining how Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine worked - including a big table of formulas which is often described as "the first computer programme".

Charles Babbage invented his mechanical computers to save everyone from the hard work of doing big mathematical calculations by hand. He only managed to build a few tiny working models of his first machine, his difference engine. It was finally built to Babbage's designs in the 1990s and you can see it in the London Science Museum. It has 8,000 mechanical parts, and is the size of small car, but when the operator turns the big handle on the side it works perfectly, and prints out correct answers.

Babbage invented, but never built, a more ambitious machine, his Analytical Engine. In modern language, this was a general purpose computer, so it could have calculated anything a modern computer can - just a lot more slowly. It was entirely mechanical, but it had all the elements we recognize today - like memory, CPU, and loops.

Lovelace's paper explains all the geeky details of how numbers are moved from memory to the CPU and back, and the way the machine would be programmed using punched cards.

But she doesn't stop there - in quaint Victorian language she tells us about the challenges familiar to every programmer today! She understands how complicated programming is:

"There are frequently several distinct sets of effects going on simultaneously; all in a manner independent of each other, and yet to a greater or less degree exercising a mutual influence."

the difficulty of getting things right:

"To adjust each to every other, and indeed even to perceive and trace them out with perfect correctness and success, entails difficulties whose nature partakes to a certain extent of those involved in every question where conditions are very numerous and inter-complicated."

and the challenge of making things go faster:

"One essential object is to choose that arrangement which shall tend to reduce to a minimum the time necessary for completing the calculation."

She explains how computing is about patterns:

"it weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves".

and inventing new ideas

"We might even invent laws ... in an arbitrary manner, and set the engine to work upon them, and thus deduce numerical results which we might not otherwise have thought of obtaining".

and being creative. If we knew the laws for composing music:

"the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent."

Alan Turing famously asked if a machine can think - Ada Lovelace got there first:

"The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform."

Wow, pretty amazing, for someone born 200 years ago.