Ada Lovelace Day: Celebrating the world's first computer programmer

Key points

From phrenology to the Analytical Engine, Lovelace blazed towards a critical IT function

Happy Ada Lovelace Day.

Much has been said, written and even drawn about this true luminary of early computing, and most of it is true (except perhaps the ray guns). If Charles Babbage designed the first computer, Lovelace conceptualised the software that would run on it.

As Lord Byron's only legitimate daughter, Augusta "Ada", Countess of Lovelace, grew up under the watchful eyes of her mother, Anne Isabella Noel, who steered her towards maths and logic in an effort to avoid developing the poetry-fuelled "insanity" of her infamous father.

Lovelace's own obsession with the concept of madness led her to an interest in phrenology, which in turn led her to attempt to create a mathematical model of the brain - a "calculus of the nervous system", as she called it.

While the medical and scientific communities would still kill for such a model today, Lovelace's interest in the inner-workings of complex machinery led her eventually to Babbage and his, at the time, unmade Analytical Engine.

While Lovelace, in defining what the Analytical Engine could do, perhaps unwisely dismissed artificial intelligence (to be later attacked by Alan Turing), the copious notes she added to her translation of a seminar - one may say these days a "keynote" - at the university of Turin resulted in the first description not only of a modern computer, but the software that would run on it.

Lovelace's assertions - completed in 1842 after a year's work - were over a hundred years before their time, and as well as laying the groundwork for programming, predicted the ability of computers to do almost anything, including abstract operations such as weaving textile patterns, and writing music.

Ada Lovelace invented the synthesiser. Discuss.

The above is an excerpt from our feature From Ada to Zuckerberg: History's most important IT people. Read it to find out Computing 's other picks of the folk who made technology what it is today.