Ada Lovelace, the world's first software programmer
Ada Lovelace day this month (March 24th), celebrates women in technology, and remembers the ‘enchantress of numbers’ who wrote the software for Charles Babbage’s Victorian computer, and is regarded as the world’s first programmer.
Among the women featured in Lab Coats and Lace, the new book which I edited for WITS, are three with a Lovelace connection, in that they were all early ‘computers’ — employed to do complex computations.
Annie Scott Dill Russell, later Mrs Annie Maunder, and Alice Everett, both from the North of Ireland, were employed as computers at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich in the late 1800s, and were among the first professional women in astronomy in Ireland or Britain. Annie Maunder was later renowned for her solar eclipse photography.
Kay McNulty, a mathematician originally from Co Donegal, was a ‘computer’ for the US military during World War Two, responsible for calculating trajectories. She was also one of the six women recruited to program the world’s first electronic computer, the ENIAC machine.
Read more about these women’s fascinating stories in the new book, or hear about them in a special podcast interview with myself and Karlin Lillington, who wrote the McNulty chapter — and did a wonderful job of telling the story of both Kay and the ENIAC. The interview was conducted by technology consultant Krishna De as her special contribution for Ada Lovelace day, and what a lovely way to remember these women who have inspired us.
