Re: Article on Ada (the person)

["Larry Elmore" <lj.elmore@gte.net>]

Jerry Petrey <jdpetreyNOSPAM@west.raytheon.com> wrote in message
news:39E339AE.8388D300@west.raytheon.com...
>
>
> 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.
>
> She even wrote a program for computing Bernouilli's numbers to run on
> Babbage's machine.  Too bad he could never get the hardware to run.
> Isn't that just like hardware engineers - always holding up our
> software :-)

It wouldn't have run anyway, though, since there were some bugs in it. I've
got a good article about it somewhere, but it's still in storage and won't
be unpacked for at least 3 more weeks. It may have been in "Communications
of the ACM" but without being able to look at my (photo)copy, I can't be
certain.

Larry