as the title says. many people have told me that Ada Lovelace invented the first computer code. as far as i could find, she only invented some sort of calculation for Bernoulli (sorry for spelling) numbers.
seems to me like saying “i invented the cap to the water bottle, before the water bottle was invented”
did she do something else? am i missing something?
edit: ah! thank you everyone, i understand!!
In: Mathematics
She had the designs for a computer.
Charles Babbage is, for our purposes, the man who invented the computer. In the 1820s he began working on his Difference Engine, a mechanical computer that could do simple math quickly. That’s really all a computer is, a machine that does math. Babbage didn’t have circuit boards and microprocessors so he used gears and wheels.
The Difference Engine was never finished, but Babbage started working on its successor, the Analytical Engine. This computer would have been Turing Complete. That means it could have done any sort of math problem. Babbage didn’t finish this computer either.
But, while he was working on it he met Ada Lovelace, and told her how his computer was going to work. At which point Lovelace pointed out that a computer can do a lot more than just math.
Lovelace ended up writing some of the first computer programs. Maybe even the first entirely. Babbage explained to her how his computer would work, and she wrote programs, on paper, for that computer. She never got to run them. But had the computer existed her programs would have worked.
Her program for finding Bernoulli Numbers is especially important. It’s the first algorithm written specifically for a Turing Complete computer. You can implement her code in a modern programming language, and run it on your own computer if you wanted.
Because modern computers work the way Babbage’s Analytics Engine would have. And modern programs work the way Lovelace’s programs for the AE did.
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