Ada Lovelace
On December 10, 1815, Ada Lovelace was born, known to most of us as the world's very first programmer. It just so happens that this title belongs to a representative of the fair sex. Today marks the two hundred and one year anniversary of the birth of this man. And in this post I would like to talk a little about the most interesting moments from her life, without getting off with fragmentary phrases, but without going too deep into the details. The material can be found anywhere with the Internet at hand. However, few people will go looking for it just for fun. Therefore, if anyone is interested, welcome to cat.
While studying at school, sitting in literature classes, I knew very well who George Byron was.
We read and, if desired, memorized his poems. After a while, having chosen a profession for myself, I learned about who the mysterious Ada Lovelace was - the first girl programmer, the daughter of that same Lord George Byron. Then it turned out to be an amazing discovery for me. For the rest of my life I remembered who Ada was and, somehow completely unnoticed by myself, I forgot about Byron himself.
Augusta Ada King (later Countess Lovelace, but more on that later) was the daughter of the English poet Lord George Gordon Byron and his wife, Anna Isabella Byron. However, Byron left them a month after the birth of his daughter, and they never saw each other again. Byron himself died when Ada was eight years old. He himself recalled his daughter more than once in his poems.
It is clear that Ada herself grew up in a rather talented family. Her mother, Anna Isabel, was very interested in mathematics even before the birth of her daughter, for which she once received a funny nickname from her husband - “the queen of parallelograms.” This was a truly unusual family. Anna, after her husband left, still managed to raise her daughter alone and this is what came of it.
At the age of twelve, Ada assembled her own flying machine! Before this, a twelve-year-old girl locked herself in her room from her mother for some time and wrote something. Her mother was afraid that she would start reading her father’s poems and go down the same path. However, all this time she was drawing.
Mathematical logic occupied her more than anything else. One day Ada fell ill and spent three years in bed. But all this time she wanted and continued to study. A variety of doctors and teachers came to see her. One of them was Augustus de Morgan, a famous mathematician and logician (yes, de Morgan’s law is named after him). Since then, Ada has become even more immersed in the world of mathematics.
As a result, Ada grew up to be a unique girl. She was beautiful and smart, just like her mother, she studied mathematics, and even surpassed the guys from Cambridge and Oxford in conversations on scientific topics. Among other people, mostly women, this caused hidden anger and envy. It was often spoken of as something dark, even devilish. It must be said that Ada herself felt unusual powers (it’s funny, but in Russian her name actually sounds a little devilish). But there is nothing unusual in this, since a girl mathematician in the high English society of that time - from the outside it really looked strange. Meanwhile, many men were crazy about her.
Mathematics is mathematics, but how did it happen that programmers remember it first of all? One of Ada Lovelace's most fateful meetings was her meeting with Charles Babbage, the inventor of the first analytical computer.
At that time, in France, where Babbage arrived, a large-scale project was launched to create tables of values of logarithms and trigonometric functions. Babbage began to dream of automating this work, at the same time eliminating possible human errors, since at that time it was people who manually created such tables. So Babbage thought about building his difference engine (calculating a polynomial using the difference method).
He created a huge number of drawings, and the prototype itself was completed in 1832, the same one that Ada Lovelace would see a year later.
In 1835, Ada would marry a very worthy man - Baron William King, who was subsequently awarded the title of Earl, and Ada herself became Countess of Lovelace. Four years later they already had three children - two sons and a daughter. The sons of Hell were named in honor of their father - one was named Ralph Gordon, and the other - Byron.
But what about that very first program in the world? And what is the fate of Babbage's machine? In 1842, Italian scientist Luis Manebrea would write a book about Babbage's machine. Ada, at Babbage's request, will translate it. During the translation of the book itself, she made a huge number of comments, seeing in this machine seems more than Babbage himself.
Here are her words: “The essence and purpose of the machine will change depending on what information we put into it. The machine will be able to write music, paint pictures and show science ways that we have never seen anywhere.” Alan Turing subsequently read her notes, introducing into his works the term Lady Lovelace’s objection to the ability of machines to think.
At the same time, when describing Babbage's machine, it was Ada who coined such computer terms as cycle and cell. She also compiled a set of operations for calculating Bernoulli numbers. This is what essentially became the very first computer program. Babbage never built his machine; it was assembled after his death and is now kept in the Science Museum in London.
Ada Lovelace herself died on November 27, 1852, at just 36 years of age. Exactly as long as her father lived. She was buried in the family crypt along with her father, whom she never recognized.
The Ada programming language, developed in the 1980s by the US Department of Defense, was named after Ada Lovelace.
P.S. Probably, those people for whom the phrase “The first programmer was a girl” causes dissatisfaction or a smile should at least once take an interest in the biography of this person. People like Ada Lovelace or Alan Turing and many others are worth remembering. And for some, these stories are another reason to understand that nothing is impossible in the world.
Thanks to those who read this article. Share your opinions, comments or observations).
So when was the first computer invented? This question cannot be answered unequivocally due to the different classifications of computers. The first mechanical computer, created by Charles Babbage in 1822, is actually not very similar to what we call a computer today.
When was the word "computer" first used?
The word "computer" was first used in 1613, and originally meant a person who performed calculations or calculations of some kind. The definition of computer carried the same meaning until the end of the 19th century, when the Industrial Revolution gave rise to machines whose main purpose was calculation.
The first mechanical computer or the concept of an automatic computing machine.
In 1822, Charles Babbage conceptualized and began developing the Difference Engine, which is considered the first automatic calculating machine. This is where the history of the computer began. The difference engine was capable of operating on multiple sets of numbers and producing paper copies of the results. Babbage was helped in developing the difference engine by Ada Lovelace, who is considered by many to be the first. Unfortunately, due to financial problems, Babbage was unable to complete a full-scale functional version of this machine. In June 1991, the Science Museum in London built Difference Engine No. 2 in honor of Babbage's bicentenary birthday, and then completed the printing mechanism in 2000.
In 1837, Charles Babbage proposed the first programmable computer, called the Analytical Engine. The Analytical Engine contained an arithmetic logic unit (ALU), basic flow control, and on-chip memory. Unfortunately, due to funding problems, this computer was never built during Charles Babbage's lifetime. It was not until 1910 that Henry Babbage, Babbage's youngest son, was able to complete the central part of this machine from his father's drawings, which was capable of performing basic arithmetic calculations.
The first computer with programming capabilities.
The first electro-mechanical binary programmable computer, the Z1, was created by German engineer Konrad Zuse in his parents' living room between 1936 and 1938, and is considered the first truly functional modern computer.
The Turing machine was proposed by Alan Turing in 1936 and became the basis for theories about computing and computers. This mechanism printed characters onto punched paper tape in a manner that emulated a human after a series of logical instructions. Without these basic principles, we would not have the computers we use today.
The first electrical programmable computer.
In December 1943, the first electrical programmable computer, the Colossus, developed by Tommy Flowers, was demonstrated and used to decipher intercepted German messages.
The first digital computer in history
The Atanasoff-Berry computer - ABC was developed by Professor Atanasoff and graduate student Cliff Berry in 1937. Its development continued until 1942 at Iowa State College (now Iowa State University).
ABC was an electrical computer that used vacuum tubes for digital computation, including binary mathematics and Boolean logic, and had no processor.
On October 19, 1973, US Federal Judge Earl R. Larson signed a decision revoking the ENIAC patent of J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly and named Atanasov as the inventor of the electronic digital computer.
ENIAC was invented by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly at the University of Pennsylvania and began construction in 1943 and was not completed until 1946. It occupied about 1,800 square feet, and used about 18,000 vacuum tubes, weighing almost 50 tons. Even though the judge ruled that the ABC computer was the first computer, many still believe that the ENIAC is the first computer because it was fully functional.
The first computer with a stored program.
The British computer, known as the EDSAC, is generally considered to be the first electronic computer to store programs in memory. The computer was launched on May 6, 1949 and was the first computer to run a graphical computer game.
Around the same time, another computer called the Manchester Mark 1 was being developed at Victoria University of Manchester, which could also execute stored programs. The first version of the Mark 1 computer went into operation in April 1949. On the night of June 16-17, 1949, Mark 1 was used to run a program to find Mersenne primes, and for nine it made no errors.
The first computer company.
The first computer company was the Electronic Controls Company, which was founded in 1949 by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, the same people who helped create the ENIAC computer. The company was later renamed EMCC or Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation and produced a series of mainframe computers under the UNIVAC name.
First stored computer program
The first computer that was capable of storing and executing a program from memory was the UNIVAC 1101 or ERA 1101, introduced to the US government in 1950.
The first commercial computer.
In 1942, Konrad Zuse began working on the Z4, which later became the first commercial computer. The computer was sold to Eduard Stiefel, a mathematician at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich on July 12, 1950.
IBM's first computer.
On April 7, 1953, IBM publicly unveiled the 701, the company's first commercial scientific computer.
The first computer with RAM
On March 8, 1955, MIT introduced the revolutionary Whirlwind computer, which was the first computer with ferrite core RAM and real-time graphics.
First transistor computer 
The TX-O (Transistor Experimental Computer) is the first transistorized computer, which was demonstrated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1956.
The first mini-computer.
In 1960, Digital Equipment Corporation released its first of many PDP computers, the PDP-1.
The first desktop and mass market computer.
In 1964, the first desktop computer, Programma 101, was presented to the public at the New York World's Fair. It was invented by Pier Giorgio Perotto and manufactured by Olivetti. Approximately 44,000 Programma 101 computers were sold, each priced at $3,200.
In 1968, Hewlett Packard began selling the HP 9100A, which is believed to be the first mass-market desktop computer.
First workstation.
Although this computer was never sold, the Xerox Alto, introduced in 1974, is considered the first workstation. The computer was revolutionary for its time and included a fully functional computer, display and mouse. This computer, like most computers today, used windows, menus, and icons as the interface to its operating system. Many of the capabilities of this computer were demonstrated on December 9, 1968.
The first microprocessor.
The first microcomputer.
In 1973, engineer André Truong Trong Thi, together with François Gernel, developed the Micral computer. Considered the first "microcomputer", it used the Intel 8008 processor and was the first commercial computer without assembly. Originally sold for $1,750.
The first personal computer.
In 1975, Ed Roberts coined the term "personal computer" when he introduced his creation, the Altair 8800, even though the first personal computer is widely believed to be the KENBAK-1, introduced for $750 in 1971. The computer relied on a series of switches for input and a series of lights for output. Thus, the history of computers reached a new level.
First laptop or laptop computer
The IBM 5100 is the first portable computer, which was released in September 1975. The computer weighed 55 pounds (25 kg) and had a five-inch CRT display, tape drive, 1.9MHz PALM processor and 64 KB of RAM.
The first truly portable computer or laptop is the Osborne I, which was designed by Adam Osborne and released in April 1981. Osborne weighed 24.5 lb (11.1 kg), had a 5-inch display, 64 KB of memory, two 5 1/4-inch floppy drives, ran the CP/M 2.2 operating system, had a modem, and cost $1,795 US .
The IBM PC Division (PCD) later released the IBM, the first portable computer, which weighed 30 pounds. Later in 1986, IBM PCD announced the first laptop, weighing 12 pounds (5.4 kg). Then, in 1994, IBM introduced the IBM ThinkPad 775CD, the first laptop with an integrated CD-ROM.
The first Apple computer.
Apple I (Apple 1) was the first Apple Computer and sold for $666.66. The computer was designed by Steve Wozniak in 1976 and featured an 8-bit processor and 4 KB of memory, expandable to 8 or 48 KB with expansion cards. Even though Apple was sold fully assembled, it still could not function without the power supply, display, keyboard and case, which were sold separately.
IBM's first personal computer.
IBM introduced its first personal computer, called the IBM PC, codenamed Acorn, in 1981. It was equipped with an 8088 processor, 16 KB of memory, which was expandable to 256 KB, and MS-DOS was used as the operating system.
The first PC clone.
The Compaq Portable model is the first PC clone and was released in March 1983 by Compaq. Compaq Portable was 100% IBM compatible and capable of running any software developed for IBM computers.
The first multimedia computer.
In 1992, Tandy Radio Shack became one of the first companies to produce computers based on the MPC standard with its introduction of the M2500 XL/2 and M4020 SX computers.
Countess
Ada Lovelace
At a technology exhibition in 1834, Charles Babbage first publicly announced his new development - the great-grandmother of the modern computer.
Naturally, his speech was full of mathematical terms and logical calculations, which were difficult for an unprepared person to understand.
And Ada Lovelace (1815-1852) not only understood everything, but also bombarded Charles with questions about the essence of the problem.
Babbage was amazed by the sharpness of the girl’s mind; moreover, Ada was almost the same age as his daughter who died early.
Who was this girl?
Ada Augusta Lovelace, née Byron, was born on December 10, 1815 in the family of the famous English poet Lord Byron and his wife Anabella. A month after the birth of the child, Lord Byron left the family and never saw his daughter again.
Anabella did everything possible to ensure that her daughter never became a poet. She hired her daughter's outstanding teachers at the time to interest her in mathematics and music, and was quite successful in this. During her serious illness, Ada, who lost the ability to walk for three years, continued her studies.
In 1834, at a technology exhibition, a young lady's obsession with mathematics came to fruition. A new, excellent opportunity has opened up, using mathematics, to make a machine help a person solve mathematical problems! Subsequently, Babbage supervised Ada's scientific studies, sent her articles and books of interest, and introduced her to his work.
Looking far ahead, I can say from my own experience that when I started writing my first computer programs as a student, I was also literally shocked by the machine’s capabilities in the field of mathematical calculations. And in terms of the volume of calculations, and in terms of speed, and in the absence of errors in the calculations, the computer, of course, did everything great!
In 1835, Ada married Lord King, who later received the title Earl of Lovelace. They had two sons and a daughter, but neither children, nor husband, nor social life could tear Ada away from her beloved mathematics. No wonder she was called the “Mistress of Numbers”!
In 1842, the Italian mathematician Luis Menebrea, a teacher of ballistics at the Turin Artillery Academy, published “An Essay on the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage.” The book was written in French, and Babbage asked Ada Augusta to translate it into English.
Countess Lovelace, reasonably judging that her mother was quite enough to care for her grandchildren and a large staff of domestic servants, happily returned to the world of mathematics. Ada Augusta decided to devote herself entirely to her favorite science, working on Babbage’s machine and its wide popularization.
By the way, her husband fully supported her. This is probably why his name went down in the history of computer technology.
For nine months, the Countess worked on the text of the book, adding her own comments and observations along the way. It was these comments and remarks that made her famous in the world of science, and at the same time introduced her into history.
In one of her notes, she independently wrote the first computer program in human history - an algorithm, which is a list of operations for calculating Bernoulli numbers.
Anticipating the “stages” of computer programming, Ada Lovelace, like modern mathematicians, begins by stating the problem, then chooses a calculation method convenient for programming, and only then proceeds to compose the program.
Lovelace's "Notes" laid the foundations for modern programming. One of the most important concepts in programming is the concept of a loop, which she defines as follows:
“A cycle of operations should be understood as any group of operations that is repeated more than once.”
Organizing loops in a program significantly reduces its size. Without such a reduction, the practical use of the analytical engine would be unrealistic, since it worked with punched cards, and a huge number of them would be required for each problem being solved.
“We can rightly say that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns in the same way as Jacquard’s loom reproduces flowers and leaves.”
– wrote Countess Lovelace. She was one of the few who understood how the machine worked and what its prospects were.
Already at that time, Ada Lovelace was fully aware of the colossal capabilities of the universal computer.
At the same time, she perfectly understood the limits of these possibilities:
“It is advisable to caution against exaggerating the capabilities of the analytical engine. The Analytical Engine does not pretend to create anything truly new. A machine can do everything that we can tell it to do. She can follow analysis; but it cannot predict any analytical relationships or truths. The function of the machine is to help us obtain what we are already familiar with.”
At the same time, already in the 40s of the 19th century, she saw in the machine what its inventor Babbage was afraid to think about: “The essence and purpose of the machine will change depending on what information we put into it. The machine will be able to write music, draw pictures and show science ways that we have never seen anywhere.”
In her first and, unfortunately, only scientific work, Ada Lovelace examined a large number of issues that are also relevant for modern programming. Countess Lovelace's notes to Luis Menebrea's book take up only 52 pages. Actually, this is all that Ada Lovelace left for history. But this brevity is the sister of enormous talent. Even 52 pages can turn the world around you beyond recognition.
When did the first computers appear? It is not so easy to answer this question, since there is no single correct classification of electronic computers, as well as formulations of what can be classified as them and what cannot.
First mention
The word "computer" was first documented in 1613 and meant a person who performs calculations. But in the 19th century, people realized that a machine never gets tired of working, and it can do work much faster and more accurately.
To begin counting the era of computing machines, the year 1822 is most often taken. The first computer was invented by the English mathematician Charles Babbage. He created the concept and began manufacturing the difference engine, which is considered the first automatic computing device. She was capable of counting multiple sets of numbers and making a printout of the results. But, unfortunately, due to funding problems, Babbage was never able to complete its full version.
But the mathematician did not give up, and in 1837 he introduced the first mechanical computer, called the Analytical Engine. It was the very first general purpose computer. At the same time, his collaboration with Ada Lovelace began. She translated and supplemented his works, and also made the first programs for his invention.
The Analytical Engine consisted of the following parts: an arithmetic-logical unit, an integrated memory unit and a device for monitoring the movement of data. Due to financial difficulties, it was also not completed during the scientist’s lifetime. But Babbage's designs and designs helped other scientists who created the first computers.
Almost 100 years later
Oddly enough, over the course of a century, computers have made almost no progress in their development. In 1936-1938, German scientist Konrad Zuse created the Z1, the first electromechanical programmable binary computer. Then, in 1936, Alan Turing built a Turing machine.
It became the basis for further theories about computers. The machine emulated the actions of a person following a list of logical instructions and printed the result of the work on a paper tape. The Zuse and Turing machines are the first computers in the modern sense, without which the computers we are accustomed to today would not have appeared.
Everything for the front
The Second World War also influenced the development of computers. In December 1943, the Tommy Flowers Company introduced a secret machine called the Kollos, which helped British agents break German message codes. It was the first all-electric programmable computer. The general public learned about its existence only in the 70s. Since then, computers have attracted the attention of not only scientists, but also the ministries of defense, which actively supported and financed their development.
There is some debate about which digital computer should be considered the first. In 1937-1942, University of Iowa professor John Vincent Atanasoff and Cliff Berry (graduate student) developed their ABC computer. And in 1943-1946 J. Presper Eckert and D. Mauchly, scientists at the University of Pennsylvania, built the most powerful ENIAC weighing 50 tons. Thus, Atanasov and Berry created their machine earlier, but since it was never fully functional, the title of “very first computer” often goes to ENIAC.
First commercial samples
With their enormous dimensions and design complexity, computers were available only to military departments and large universities, which assembled them themselves. But already in 1942, K. Zuse began work on the fourth version of his brainchild - Z4, and in July 1950 he sold it to the Swedish mathematician Eduard Stiefel.
And the first computers that began to be mass produced were models with the laconic name 701, produced by IBM on April 7, 1953. A total of 19,701 of them were sold. Of course, these were still machines intended only for large institutions. In order to become truly widespread, they needed a few more important improvements.
So, in 1955, on March 8, the “Whirlwind” went into operation - a computer that was originally conceived during the Second World War as a simulator for pilots, but by the time of its creation it arrived in time for the beginning of the Cold War. It then became the basis for the development of SAGE, an air defense subsystem designed to automatically target interceptor aircraft. The key features of the Whirlwind were the presence of 512 bytes of RAM and the display of graphic information on the screen in real time.
Technology to the masses
The TX-O computer, introduced in 1956 at MIT, was the first to use transistors. This made it possible to greatly reduce the cost and dimensions of the equipment.
The team of scientists who developed the TX-O then left the institute, founded Digital Equipment Corporation, and introduced the PDP-1 computer in 1960, ushering in the era of minicomputers. They were no larger than one room or even a closet, and were intended for a wider range of clients.
Well, the first desktop computers began to be produced by Hewlett Packard in 1968.
The first computer program was written by a woman, a mother of three and an aristocrat. And she wrote it even before the world's first computer appeared.
Princess Lovelace or Ada A. Byron-King is the daughter of the great British poet Lord Byron. Her father abandoned her mother when she was little. The mother was extremely happy that her little daughter was very interested in mathematics, although there were also attempts to follow in her father’s footsteps and write poetry. Once, at the age of 12, she showed her mother scribbled pieces of paper, on which young Ada drew a drawing of an aircraft.
At the age of 17, assigned to the court, the girl did not look for a boyfriend, but joined the mathematician researcher Charles Babbage. She was so fascinated by the idea of an automatic adding machine, which was considered crazy at the time, that she spent all her energy on designing it. Babbage was inspired by the fact that Napoleon had already ordered something similar and his court scientists were unable to complete the invention due to the outbreak of war.
Babbage came up with a name for his future machine and called it “differential”. In 1882, the scientist intrigued the British Admiralty and they became sponsors of his developments. The size of the machine was enormous, it had to occupy an entire room and calculate to the 10th decimal place. In 10 years, the scientist built only one block of his device. The idea of the Analytical Engine captivated Babbage; he essentially offered the world a blueprint for an almost modern computer. He called the central processor a mill; there were punch cards and instruction programs. The machine consisted of many gears and had to be powered by steam. In 1871, Charles Babbage died and the English government decided that no one else was capable of inventing such a machine and closed the project.
But nevertheless, on July 13, 1843, Ada sent a letter to the mathematician, in which she outlined an algorithm for machine calculations of Bernoulli numbers. Ada believed that data processing by a machine did not have to be analytical or arithmetic; she considered this a fallacy. The machine understands numbers just like letters or other symbols. The Countess believed that in the future machines would be able to write music and even poetry.
She herself had fun - searching for a formula that would always allow her to win the betting at the races. Ada died at the age of 37, lived as long as her father and was buried in the same tomb as Lord Byron. On her birthday, December 10, many countries celebrate Programmer's Day, and in the 70s, the Pentagon named the ADA programming language in her honor.
