I was watching a fantastic special on PBS tonight about women in the digital divide and I learned something really cool. The first programmer in the world was a woman named Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (1815–1852). She was more commonly known as Ada Lovelace and the programming language Ada was named after her:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace.
She was programming a machine that had not even been built yet and saw potential stretching beyond mere calculation while others had focused on that potential alone.
She is mainly known for having written a description of Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine. She is today appreciated as the "first programmer" since she was writing programs—that is, encoding an algorithm in a form to be processed by a machine—for a machine that Babbage had not yet built. She also foresaw the capability of computers to go beyond mere calculating or number-crunching while others, including Babbage himself, focused only on these capabilities.[1]
