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...