The first systems analyst

I don’t know if you knew this, but the first systems analyst, and programmer, was a woman: Countess Ada Lovelace, daughter of the famous English poet Lord Byron.

She studied the designs of the machine Charles Babbage wanted to build, the famous Analytical Engine. She understood Babbage’s device so well that she could articulate the promise of this new machine much better than its inventor. She realized that it was what we would call today a general-purpose computer, capable of “developing and tabulating any function whatever… the engine may be described as being the material expression of any indefinite function of any degree of generality and complexity”.

What’s all this about?

This coming March 24 will be Ada Lovelace Day, a day on which several of us have pledged to write about Ada Lovelace and reflect on the role of women in computing. It’s an idea driven by Suw Charman-Anderson, co-author of Strange Attractor. So I’ll see you on March 24, when we commemorate this great woman.