A lot of people don't realize just how much women have contributed to the world of computing from far back in history all the way to the present moment. Sometimes they are forgotten, sometimes they are rendered subordinate, sometimes they are simply pushed to the background -- and then forgotten.

Thanks to the information age however (made possible by computers), anyone can look back in time and be amazed at how much women have made possible in computing.

Lady Ada Lovelace (nee Byron)

Of course, no discussion of this topic can fail to start with Lady Ada Lovelace. I am sure she needs no introduction. Still, she was a British lady, born to the family of Lord Byron (famous poet) Interestingly, after her parents divorced, her mother pushed her into mathematics and science as a way of making her less like her father, the poet. LOL.

Fast-forward a few years to when she meets Charles Babbage (widely known as the father of computing) and learns of his plans for the Difference Engine and Analytical Engine. Her contribution? She wrote the program code for using the device to calculate Bernouli Numbers. This automatically makes her the first computer programmer in known human history.

But she didn't stop there. Here are two quotes from her own writings about the possible future applications of the Analytical Engine and therefore computers in general:

Again, it might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine. Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent….

Those bolded parts are where Ada Lovelace in 1840-whenever figured out that computers could be used not just for mathematics but for anything that can be reduced to mathematics. This includes music and graphics and anything at all, as we now know in today's world.

Another quote:

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate any thing. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths. Its province is to assist us in making available what we are already acquainted with.

Sound familiar? Then you have heard of GiGo (Garbage in, Garbage Out)

Another:

This it is calculated to effect primarily and chiefly of course, through its executive faculties; but it is likely to exert an indirect and reciprocal influence on science itself in another manner. For, in so distributing and combining the truths and the formula of analysis, that they may become most easily and rapidly amenable to the mechanical combinations of the engine, the relations and the nature of many subjects in that science are necessarily thrown into new lights, and more profoundly investigated.

This is clearly her anticipating the advent of the kind of computing that made things like the Human Genome Project possible. In other words, what we now call Big Data.

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Next in this series, we will skip ahead to World War II where a beautiful actress invented a technology, meant to help with the war effort, that would eventually become Wifi.

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