In the dim glow of an oil lamp on a winter evening in 1843, a 27-year-old woman paused over a stack of manuscript pages, dipped her pen, and wrote a sentence that would echo for centuries: “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything.” Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace — known to history simply as Ada Lovelace — was annotating a dry technical article about a machine that did not yet exist. She was also, without quite knowing it, drawing a line between what a machine can be taught and what a mind can imagine on its own. A line we are still arguing about today.
Few stories better illustrate the strange dance between human foresight and technological readiness than Ada Lovelace’s brief, brilliant life.
…
Read the full article on Nspirement
Comments