The second Tuesday in October is Ada Lovelace Day (ALD). This is not just a day to celebrate Ada herself, generally given the honor of being considered the first computer programmer, but it is an international day celebrating the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering, and maths (aka STEM). This year, since October 1 was a Tuesday, it is as early as it can be...namely, October 8 (aka today).

There is a big event in London on ALD each year. I'm not sure if it is live-streamed, too (and if not, the talks will be on YouTube later):

This year, ALD Live! will be held on Tuesday, 8 October, at The IET in London. We have a fabulous line-up of speakers, including astrophysicist Dame Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell, ecologist Dr Bala Chaudhary, mathematician Katie Steckles, bio-physicist Yolanda Ohene, marine engineer Hayley Loren, chartered engineering geologist Roni Savage, and evolutionary biologist and science communicator Dr Sally Le Page. Our compère once again will be geek songstress and one third of Festival of the Spoken Nerd Helen Arney.

More details on the Ada Lovelace Day website.

As it happens, the EDA industry had an Ada Lovelace moment last week, when, for the first time after 25 years it selected a woman to receive the Phil Kaufman award, EDA's highest honor. The 2019 honoree will be Mary Jane Irwin of Penn State. You can read more of the story in my post The 2019 Kaufman Award Goes to Mary Jane Irwin. Tomorrow's Breakfast Bytes post will give Mary Jane's story, but today it is Ada's.

Who Was Ada?

So who was Ada Lovelace? For a start, she was Lord Byron's only child. Well, the only legitimate one, he had several other children by other women. So she was Ada Byron. Lord Byron separated from his wife when Ada was a few weeks old, and left England forever soon after. He died when she was eight years old, having had no relationship with her. Surprisingly, Lord Byron has already made an appearance in Breakfast Bytes in the amazing story of Frankenstein, which Mary Shelley came up with during a group vacation at Lord Byron's summer villa when she was 18.

Lady Byron, Ada's mother, was a mathematician. She had her daughter schooled in science and mathematics and discouraged literary study since she was worried she would thereby inherit her father's rebelliousness. However, Ada ended up both—a strong mathematician and rebellious. One of her tutors in mathematics was Augustus de Morgan, famous for de Morgan's Rules of Boolean algebra. She tried, unsuccessfully since she got recognized, to elope with another of her tutors in 1833 when she was 18. Later that same year, yet another tutor, Mary Somerville, introduced her to Charles Babbage. Mary Somerville was famous in her own right as the first female member of the Royal Astronomical Society. She appears on the Royal Bank of Scotland £10 note.

Babbage was the inventor of the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine. Some parts of the Difference Engine were built but it was never completed. Eventually, the (London) Science Museum built one from the original plans and it worked! The Analytical Engine is generally regarded as the first programmable computer, albeit entirely mechanical. Construction of the Analytical Engine never started, although there were a lot of detailed plans. You can see some animation of both engines working in my blog post Carry: Babbage's Engines. The programs for the analytical engine would have been on punched cards—not the kind of punched cards that I grew up using but the punched cards that were used to carry the pattern for Jacquard looms.

When they met, Ada was 18 and Babbage was 42. She corresponded with him throughout the development of the Analytical Engine.

Ada married William King in 1835, and became Lady King. When King was made Earl of Lovelace in 1838, Ada thereby became Countess of Lovelace. I don't think it is quite correct protocol, but she is always known today as Ada Lovelace. She had 3 children. She died in 1852 aged just 36.

Girls Who Code

Her big claim to fame is that she was the first person to "code like a girl". In fact, some historians consider that she was the first person to code at all. In the early 1840s, she translated a paper by the Italian Luigi Menabrea on the engines. They seemed to have gained more interest overseas than in England. Ada added detailed notes, which were longer than the original paper. Many consider the notes to contain the first computer program, for calculating a sequence of Bernoulli numbers. However, other historians point out that Babbage's notes from earlier when he was designing the Analytical Engine contained the first programs. There are 24 of them, some with bugs.

The Analytical Engine actually seems impractical to program. It had three main sections, each with its own program stored on punched loom cards. The three programs had to operate in synchrony for the Analytical Engine to perform its task. Today, that would be easy, we could just write a program to punch the cards, but doing everything by hand would have been impossibly difficult. The first digital computers (electronic) were almost impossible to program since, not only were there no high-level languages or compilers, there was not even assembly code or assemblers.

Here is a marvelous animation created by artist/mathematician/author Sydney Padua, which gives you some idea of just how sophisticated it was, and also how difficult it would be to program without a computer to help you. Almost every gear in this video is actually topped with 49 more, since the Analytical Engine had a "word length" of 50 decimal digits (so about 170 bits...it makes 64 bits look wimpy).

Sydney is also the author of the graphic novel The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage.

Ada Programming Language

In the late 1970s, the US DoD realized that they were using nearly 500 different programming languages. They decided to contract to get a new programming language developed to supersede all of them except Fortran and Cobol. The program was very structured, starting from a Strawman list of requirements, and then gradually working through more and more detailed technical requirements with the names Woodenman, Tinman, Ironman, Steelman. Four programming languages were developed, with Red, Green, Blue, and Yellow as their working names. Green, developed by a French team, won, and was renamed Ada, in honor of Ada Lovelace.

The Ada programming language was mostly focused on real-time safety-critical systems. It was mandated for a long time by the DoD. However, it has been widely used in avionics and air traffic control, as well as the Ariane rockets, and train systems such as the French TGV. The signaling systems used in the New York subway, the London Underground, the Paris Métro, and the Hong Kong MTR are all implemented in Ada. if you fly in a Boeing 777 as I often do, the avionics is written in Ada. The Canadian and UK air traffic control systems are written in Ada. You can read about Ada's Vital Role in New US Air Traffic Control Systems. This was introduced starting in 2015 to (finally!) replace the 40-year-old systems still in use.

So Ada is still looking after you today.

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