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
Her work revolved around a proposed Analytical Engine, mechanical computer designed by Charles Babbage. The machine as designed would have been Turing Complete, which means it would have been able to do anything a modern computer would be able to do. The first ever.
I’m not that clear on the exact details of what exactly she proposed in her notes because I haven’t read them, but while everyone else was focusing on just crunching numbers like a glorified calculator, she realised the machine had more capability than that. Basically, she understood a computer to be a computer as we know them, not just a mechanical abacus.
But since the Analytical Engine was never actually built, all that insight came just from the designs. So her insights and algorithms pre-date any actually built computers.
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