SHE WROTE ABOUT COMPUTERS BEFORE COMPUTERS EXISTED

Victorian England.

Steam engines.

Punch cards.

Mechanical gears.

And a woman imagining a machine that could manipulate information.

If that doesn't belong on Steampunk Australia, we're not sure what does.

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace — better known as Ada Lovelace — was born in 1815.

In 1833 she met inventor Charles Babbage, who was developing extraordinary mechanical calculating machines.

But when Ada looked at Babbage's proposed Analytical Engine, she saw something beyond calculation.

She realised that such a machine could potentially manipulate symbols and information according to instructions.

Not simply numbers.

She even imagined the possibility of machines dealing with things like music.

In 1843, Lovelace translated an article about Babbage's machine and added an enormous collection of her own notes — several times longer than the original paper.

Among them was a detailed procedure for calculating Bernoulli numbers.

It is often described as an early computer program.

There is debate among historians about exactly how we should use the title “first computer programmer”, but there's little argument about something far more important:

Ada understood the possibilities of general-purpose computing astonishingly early.

A mechanical machine.

Instructions.

Information.

Punch cards.

A century before electronic computers transformed the world.

She died tragically young at just 36.

But the future she imagined kept coming.

Women Who Built the Future — Steampunk Australia

Leading to the launch of Wrinkles in the Fabric with Dr Kathryn Spurling.

We are spending three weeks remembering women who looked at the world they had been given and imagined something more.

Ada Lovelace saw that Babbage's Analytical Engine might do far more than arithmetic, including manipulating symbols and even musical information; her 1843 notes included the famous Bernoulli-number procedure.