Re: Article on Ada (the person)

[Frank Christiny <fchris@pdq.net>]

There was a great article on Ada, the Lady, and the, so called, first
computer program in the May 1999 issue of Scientific American called
"Ada and the First Computer" by Eugene Eric Kim and Betty Alexandra
Toole.  Unfortunately is has not made it to the Web yet.  It is
interesting in that for the first time one gets to see the actual
contents of the famous "program", a scheme to find B sub 7, the fourth
Bernoulli number.  Not surprisingly, it bears no resemblance to any
known current computer languages, although it has a delicious
"contemporaneous" look.  (Wonder if they will be saying that of some
of our programs a hundred years hence).

-- 
Frank Christiny                       fchris@pdq.net
Sr. Software Engineer                 Lockheed Martin Space Operations
Houston, Texas, USA                   http://freeweb.pdq.net/fchris/



Ted Dennison wrote:
> 
> I had always heard that "Ada Byron is commonly considered the first
> programmer". But I had never really heard a good rationale for this.
> 
> There's a great page/online book on the history of computing at
> http://www.warbaby.com/FG_test/comp_history.html , which has a couple of
> very enlightening paragraphs on the subject.
> 
> --
> T.E.D.
> 
> http://www.telepath.com/~dennison/Ted/TED.html
> Day 1 of Free Europe
> 
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