The First Programmer: Ada Augusta

One important exception was the figure of Ada Augusta, Countess of Lovelace. Ada not only understood the brilliance of Babbage's design for the Analytical Engine; she also tried to illustrate this to others. Ironically, Ada was the daughter of Lord Byron, who penned a number of works that were very critical of Industrial Revolution technologies and their adverse effects upon the quality of human life.

Ada herself designed many sequences of Babbage's machine's basic operations that added up to substantive mathematical computations. For this reason, she is often called the first programmer. Impressively, she made use of a number of software design elements (such as the loop, in which an operation is repeated until a certain condition occurs) that are now fundamental to all programming languages.

Ada's significance to the history of computing was marked by the naming of a programming language in her honor: Ada, developed in 1983 by the United States Department of Defense (with a follow-up version later, called Ada95).

Ada was also the subject of a 1997 film by Lynn Hershman-Leeson, Conceiving Ada.

Ada is only one of many important (and, sadly, underrecognized) women in the history of computing.