They may now be forgotten, but decades ago, it was women who pioneered computer programming. Sadly, now that's a part of history that even the smartest people don't know.
So who started it?
Ada Lovelace, also known as the Countess of Lovelace, was born in 1815. She was the daughter of Lord Byron. Lady Byron didn't want her to turn out a romantic poet like her father, so she had her tutored almost exclusively in mathematics. Lovelace, though, saw the poetry in Math.
At 17, she met Charles Babbage who showed her plans for a machine he believed would be able to do complex math calculations. Lovelace envisioned that "a computer can do anything that can be noted logically. Words, pictures and music, not just numbers. She understands how you take an instruction set and load it into the machine, and she even does an example, which is programming Bernoulli numbers, an incredibly complicated sequence of numbers."
Babbage's machine was never built. But his designs and Lovelace's notes were read by people building the first computer a century later. The computer language ADA was named after her in recognition of her pioneering work with Charles Babbage.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/10/06/345799830/the-forgotten-female-programmers-who-created-modern-tech?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits
