Ada Lovelace: The First Computer Programmer
Photos of the Month —December 2015
On December 10th, 1815, Ada Lovelace was born to the poet George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron – commonly known as Lord Byron - and the 11th Baroness of Wentworth, Anne Isabella Milbanke. Hoping to discourage any chance of Ada becoming a poet like her absent father, Anne Isabella encouraged Ada’s study of mathematics and logic.
Ada’s success in her mathematical studies led her to meet fellow British mathematician Charles Babbage. Lovelace and Babbage’s collaborations would go on to produce the first published description of computer programming. For this reason, Ada Lovelace is often identified as the first computer programmer. Without computers, the physics community – and world - would be at a loss.
In honor of Ada Lovelace’s birthday, we wanted to highlight some of the images from our collection of computers from the past. Technology has come a long way from computers being the size of an entire office, to devices that can be held in our pockets. Our selected images include University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s “DOLLY”, the Institute for Advanced Study’s “MANIAC 1”, Bellaire’s “nCUBE-2” and other scientists hard at work with computing systems.
Please enjoy these photos from our archives. To see more images like the ones we’ve selected type the name “computer” in the search engine.
Arnold Nordsieck seated at the controls of his analog computer, the Nordsieck Differential Analyzer built out of war surplus materials in the late 1940s. It could solve complex equations and draw curves.
Department of Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, courtesy AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives
Guillermo Mayorga peers through computer tape rack.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, courtesy AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection
Unidentified person works with “DOLLY”
Department of Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, courtesy AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives
Some of the members of the Meteorology Project at the Institute for Advanced Study, L-R: Jule Charney, Norman Phillips, Glenn Lewis, N. Gilbarg, George Platzman, the IAS computer, MANIAC 1, is in the background, the photographer Joseph Smagorinsky was also a member of the project.
Photograph by Joseph Smagorinsky, courtesy AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives, gift of John M. Lewis Photo date: 1952
L-R: Alfred Bork (standing) and unidentified people read and converse at the University of California, Irvine campus. Computers
AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection
L-R: Former student Stephane Courteau and Sandra Faber laugh and converse while at a computer monitor.
University of California, Santa Cruz, courtesy AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives, gift of Dr. Faber
Jerry Danburg, Director of Computing and Information Sciences Research at the Bellaire Research Center, displays the nCUBE-2, a second-generation parallel computer that is among the fastest on the market (Houston, TX).
AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives, Danburg Collection
