Article on Ada (the person)

Article on Ada (the person)

[Ted Dennison]

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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Re: Article on Ada (the person)

[Frank Christiny]

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
> 
> Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
> Before you buy.

Re: Article on Ada (the person)

[Jerry Petrey]

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.


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 :-)

Jerry

PS For a good biography of Ada (including many of her own letters to
Babbage) look at the book "Ada: The Enchantress of Numbers".

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
-- Jerry Petrey                                                
-- Senior Principal Systems Engineer - Member Team Ada & Team Forth
-- Raytheon Missile Systems 
-- NOTE: please remove NOSPAM in email address to reply                  
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: Article on Ada (the person)

[Larry Elmore]

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