Hardware Guy, Software Girl

Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace. They are considered the founding parents of computers. But I didn’t know that Babbage was the “hardware” guy while Lovelace was the “software” girl until I read Walter Isaacson’s Innovators.

The idea (and need) to automate tedious and error-prone calculations was there since Leibniz and Pascal. Babbage himself created the Difference Engine to perform basic arithmetic operations like addition and subtraction. He was inspired by the automated loom invented by Joseph-Marie Jacquard: holes in punch cards determined “which hooks and rods would be activated in each pass of the weave, thus automating the creation of intricate patterns”.

Could something similar be done to create a general-purpose “computer”, wondered Babbage. And thus was born the idea of the Analytical Engine. Funding however was a problem. The British government funded the much simpler Difference Engine, but wouldn’t fun the general purpose Analytical Engine since they didn’t see any use for it (!).

Enter Ada Lovelace. She could totally see the point of such a machine. In her now famous Notes on the topic, she explored four key concepts:

1)      Such a machine could be programmed and re-programmed to perform a “limitless and changeable array of tasks”. She pointed out that the Analytical Engine was far more than a mere “calculating machine”.

2)     It could extend beyond crunching things far beyond just numbers. It could “store, manipulate, process and act upon anything that could be expressed in symbols”. Today we take that for granted when we use computing for inconceivable-at-the-time things like music.

3)     She identified the concept of step-by-step instructions to give to such a machine to achieve highly complicated results. Today we know that as… a computer algorithm.

4)     Finally, she translated the step-by-step instructions into what we’d call a “computer program” using tables and diagrams that map to modern day computer operators and registers/variables.

Lovelace, however, wanted to publish her Notes as a “serious scientific paper”, not “merely as a public advocacy piece” to back Babbage’s Analytical Machine.

Babbage obviously wanted to use Lovelace’s notes as a way to get funding for his machine. Lovelace refused to “become his organ”. She offered to become his business partner to lend her “connections and persuasive pen” to his efforts, but the above-mentioned Notes would remain a pure scientific paper. Babbage was unwilling to share business control and they “never again collaborated on science”, though their personal relationship survived…