×
welcome covers

Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please


If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Brief Lives

Ada Lovelace (1815-1852)

Alistair MacFarlane on how a poet’s daughter invented the concept of software.

In 1842, more than a century before the start of the information age, in a brilliant flash of penetrating insight, Ada Lovelace had a glimpse of the future. She saw that with suitable modifications, Charles Babbage’s proposed Analytical Engine would be capable of much more than its intended purpose of simple mathematical calculation. Lovelace realised that such a device could be set to execute any logically coherent sequence of instructions, and in this she became the world’s first computer programmer: together with Babbage, she invented what we now call software. When she had her marvellous insight she was in the twenty-seventh year of her short life, and had less than ten years left to live.

Ada Lovelace
Portrait of Ada Lovelace by Alfred Chalon, 1838

Romance & Reality

Augusta Ada Byron, who became the first Countess of Lovelace and is usually known as Ada Lovelace, was born on 10 December 1815 in Piccadilly, London.