What did Ada Lovelace’s program actually do? @TwoBitHistory
Over a century before Allen and Gates wrote their first BASIC interpreter, Ada Lovelace wrote and published a computer program. She, too, wrote a program for a computer that had only been described to her. But her program, unlike the Microsoft BASIC interpreter, was never run, because the computer she was targeting was never built.
Lovelace’s program is often called the world’s first computer program. Not everyone agrees that it should be called that. Lovelace’s legacy, it turns out, is one of computing history’s most hotly debated subjects.
In fairness, Lovelace’s program is not easy to explain to the layperson without some hand-waving. It’s the intricacies of her program, though, that make it so remarkable.
Two-Bit History dives into Lovelace’s program. Check out the details here.
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It took a while to understand, and I can understand why some were unsure if it was even a program, but once you get past the unfamiliar syntax and her 19th century prose in her “Notes”, it starts to look very familiar to anyone with some experience in 20th century assembly language.
Ada Lovelace’s program is fascinating. I recently wrote a blog series about my experience getting her program to run on modern computers: https://pairdebuggingwithlovelace.hashnode.dev/
It took a while to understand, and I can understand why some were unsure if it was even a program, but once you get past the unfamiliar syntax and her 19th century prose in her “Notes”, it starts to look very familiar to anyone with some experience in 20th century assembly language.