Yeah. Along with Grace Hopper, famous for (kinda) coining the term 'bug' and one of the first true electronic computer programmers, Ada was a real pioneer who got left in the dustbin of history for a while there. It's our job to bring her up from there.
Thanks for resurrecting Ada Lovelace from the dustbins of history. I'm amazed she saw so far, such as manipulating symbols with the system. Anyone who saw hundreds of years after their time must be a genius.
That's a great callout, because in some ways, Colossus was the spiritual successor to the Analytical Engine. They never could get the Engine built, but it would have operated in a similar way to Colossus.
Believe it or not, I dabbled in assembly language in Elementary school - writing about that this Friday.
After that I bubbled smiley faces in FORTRAN - one of my first articles is about that - https://newsletter.wirepine.com/p/before-the-screens. Then I took a city college class in APL - A Programming Language. Early programming trauma that one. Then BASIC. My 7th grade shop teacher got us a TRS-80 to play around with.
My first CS class in college was this super entertaining prof who wrote a book called Oh! Pascal (he wanted it to alphabetically show up in the bookstore before the other Pascal books). He collected money from everyone to buy a boombox and he welded it into a cage and locked in the basement computer lab where we'd do all-nighters while Motown blared. He loved him some Diana Ross.
Sounds like an awesome prof! I had a couple really good ones too, and at least 2 really good high school teachers.
I'm looking forward to the Assembly language thing! I keep thinking about my own BASIC on the CoCo2 (TRS 80 from like 83 or 84 with the "melty" keyboard). It taught me a bit about how to think.
Hadn’t heard of the CoCo2! Did it still use a cassette tape deck for loading programs? That always fascinated me. The thing about assembly and early computers without a display or paper output is you had to key in these cryptic hex commands without mistake or the program would crash and debugging wasn’t a thing - you just had to type it all in again
Yes, cassettes for programs! Whenever people mimic the early AOL online screech thing, I actually hear the cassette loading a program first in my mind. This was before floppies, but not much before. I think we had an external monitor, or perhaps we used an old TV... not really sure. It seems unlikely that we would have had a 2nd color TV by 1983 or 84, though, so I'm figuring it was a monitor. Must have been a big splurge at the time for my dad, but he was nerd like me at heart, so this was crucial.
We are all expert programmers today, and we don't even have to know any language other than English. How far we have come!
Programs took soooo long to load! And I don't think there was any progress indicator or anything on the screen except maybe a flashing cursor. We must've had some serious patience back the
The Difference Engine was the subject of a SF novel by that name by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling.
We're only now starting to understand how pivotal Ada's work was; her gender and her relation to Byron prejudiced a lot of people before then.
Yeah. Along with Grace Hopper, famous for (kinda) coining the term 'bug' and one of the first true electronic computer programmers, Ada was a real pioneer who got left in the dustbin of history for a while there. It's our job to bring her up from there.
Of course we should remember Admiral Hopper as well.
"One day, maybe you could even generate art or music."
Come on, man, that sounds like pure sorcery. There's no way mere algorithms will ever be able to pull off something like that!
Can AI even be funny?
https://goatfury.substack.com/p/can-ai-be-funny
I read this book years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. Gibson is a genius:
https://a.co/d/5RpMUpy
And an historical account:
You purchased this edition on March 12, 2004!
https://a.co/d/daAxy2n
Thanks for resurrecting Ada Lovelace from the dustbins of history. I'm amazed she saw so far, such as manipulating symbols with the system. Anyone who saw hundreds of years after their time must be a genius.
The picture reminds me of Turing’s computer that beat Nazi Encryption.
Colossus! That was an incredible achievement too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer
That's a great callout, because in some ways, Colossus was the spiritual successor to the Analytical Engine. They never could get the Engine built, but it would have operated in a similar way to Colossus.
Heard of Babbage and Ada but never looked further back than Turing. Brits had it going on.
My first programming project was manipulating words. Coding a word processor in Pascal, in a basement, while listening to Motown on a boombox.
Tell me about the Motown.
But also: was Pascal the first language you learned?
Believe it or not, I dabbled in assembly language in Elementary school - writing about that this Friday.
After that I bubbled smiley faces in FORTRAN - one of my first articles is about that - https://newsletter.wirepine.com/p/before-the-screens. Then I took a city college class in APL - A Programming Language. Early programming trauma that one. Then BASIC. My 7th grade shop teacher got us a TRS-80 to play around with.
My first CS class in college was this super entertaining prof who wrote a book called Oh! Pascal (he wanted it to alphabetically show up in the bookstore before the other Pascal books). He collected money from everyone to buy a boombox and he welded it into a cage and locked in the basement computer lab where we'd do all-nighters while Motown blared. He loved him some Diana Ross.
Sounds like an awesome prof! I had a couple really good ones too, and at least 2 really good high school teachers.
I'm looking forward to the Assembly language thing! I keep thinking about my own BASIC on the CoCo2 (TRS 80 from like 83 or 84 with the "melty" keyboard). It taught me a bit about how to think.
Hadn’t heard of the CoCo2! Did it still use a cassette tape deck for loading programs? That always fascinated me. The thing about assembly and early computers without a display or paper output is you had to key in these cryptic hex commands without mistake or the program would crash and debugging wasn’t a thing - you just had to type it all in again
Yes, cassettes for programs! Whenever people mimic the early AOL online screech thing, I actually hear the cassette loading a program first in my mind. This was before floppies, but not much before. I think we had an external monitor, or perhaps we used an old TV... not really sure. It seems unlikely that we would have had a 2nd color TV by 1983 or 84, though, so I'm figuring it was a monitor. Must have been a big splurge at the time for my dad, but he was nerd like me at heart, so this was crucial.
We are all expert programmers today, and we don't even have to know any language other than English. How far we have come!
Programs took soooo long to load! And I don't think there was any progress indicator or anything on the screen except maybe a flashing cursor. We must've had some serious patience back the