But there I was sitting at the at Oxford library, reading these letters of hers and what one biographer told me to do, and it's the best advice for anybody in every situation.

She was pictured as a lousy mathematician, promiscuous, a dope addict you know, she was the Devil - so that you wouldn't notice what she did. Then in 1985, MIT came out with a biography on Ada and in this biography, she was trashed.

I went to London and picked up every book that had any mention of Lovelace. I went to the Mill Valley library and took out 20 biographies and read them in two and a half weeks. That same day, I went to the Mount Tam racquet club and I was lying in the sauna with a girlfriend and said, 'I'm doing research on Ada Byron.' And she said, 'Was that Lord Byron's daughter or his sister?' And I said, 'What are you talking about?' And she said, 'Well, he had a daughter with his sister.' Well, that did it. The editor pointed to the paragraph about Ada and said, 'Her: I want to know about her.' I took a chapter of my dissertation to the editor to be used as trivia. I totally forgot about Ada until November 1983 when Stewart Brand came out with the Whole Earth software catalog. It said, 'Ada Lovelace wrote notes describing the Analytical Engine. I went to London and next to Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine was a picture of a beautiful Victorian lady. In 1976 I was writing my doctoral dissertation at Berkeley, on the impact of the calculator on education. My interest in meeting Toole was not only in finding out more about Lovelace herself but also how the book came to be and what drove the author in her quest. Perhaps only an addiction could generate the enormous energy over many years that a pursuit like this requires. Toole's ultimate achievement is not only a volume that sheds light on Lovelace as a major contributor to computing history but one that also clears up the myths and untruths which have surrounded Lovelace's life, origins and, often, her accomplishments themselves. This plan is now regarded as the first 'computer program.' She also indicated to Babbage how the engine might calculate Bernoulli numbers. In 1843, Ada wrote a prescient article suggesting how this machine might be used in the future. Lovelace and Babbage became friends and exchanged many letters regarding this machine. Ada was one of the few at the time who understood what Babbage was describing. In 1834, she first heard Babbage's formative thoughts regarding a fantastical calculating machine that could not only foresee but could act on that foresight. Toole is the author of the newly reprinted 'Ada: The Enchantress of Numbers,' a combination biography and letters of the 'mother of computer programming.' It is the story of Ada Lovelace who developed the basic programming concepts for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, a calculating machine commonly considered the first computer.Īda Lovelace was the daughter of Lord Byron.

Enchantress of numbers