Ada Lovelace: The first computer programmer

Charles Babbage is well known as the father of computer science. But there was also another hands that worked behind the development of this first, so called, computer. It was Ada Lovelace, who did the software part of this computer (though there was not much distinction between hardware and software during that time). 

Ada Lovelace was born in 1815. During her childhood itself her mother left his father, who was a poet, and a very bad man by character. Her mother was a mathematician and obviously Ada Lovelace was dragged towards mathematics and science in her early childhood itself.

It was during this time that Charles Babbage was building his difference engine, of which's logic, he thought nobody would crack. But Ada was able to understand the complexity of his invention and this lead to a healthy friendship to develop between them. This was how Ada was inspired to translate an article on analytic engine by an Italic Scientist in French. During translating, she was advised to add her own notes about understanding the working and functions of the engine. This resulted in creating a document which was several times larger than the original document. These notes comprises of ideas which, the world took another century to implement.

And during this time she created the first known program which was a set of instructions to calculate Bernaulli numbers. She was also the first one to foresee the idea of using computers are not just for calculations, but things like graphics and sound.

But all this was done just during a 35 year life span of hers. She died of cancer at an age of 35, being unable to complete working on the ideas she had about developing computers. Though the starting was marked by Ada and Charles Babbage, the world had to wait for centuries to make their ideas come into existence. After the introduction of Turing machine, things geared up much faster.

The computer language Ada, created on behalf of the United States Department of Defense, was named after Ada Lovelace. The reference manual for the language was approved on 10 December 1980, and the Department of Defense Military Standard for the language. And 24th March is declared as "Ada Lovelace Day" by social software consultant Suw Charman-Anderson in an attempt to use the Victorian countess as a poster girl for the contribution of women to technology past, present and future.

But being a woman from her era, it was brave from her part to come to this field. And being a woman, I feel proud to say about Ada Lovelace.