eli5 how did Ada Lovelace invent “the first computer code” before computers existed?

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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

18 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

There was not a computer, but there was a design for a computer that was under construction. (It only did not get finished because the inventor kept updating the designs and the craftsmen building it had to keep starting parts over and it ran way over budget.)

So she understood the designs and wrote algorithms for the machine for when it was built and recognized it had far more potential (even as designed) than others realized with the correct programming. She even considered things very similar to Turing Completeness, like how one day computers could be programmed to write poetry.

So it really was incredible she did so much before a computer was even built.

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