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Programmer Buys Original Ada Lovelace Painting On eBay
An anonymous reader sends the story of the rediscovery of an original painting of Ada Byron at about age 4, the girl who was to become Countess Lovelace and the world's first computer programmer. A US Army sergeant in Tajikistan caught wind of an eBay auction of a 180-year-old painting of Ada Byron, with provenance; he notified a programmer buddy in Texas, who won the auction.
Shelly "is widely considered to be among the finest lyric poets of the English language."
That's a strong endorsement. Lord Byron had an interesting group of characters about him. Between them they make Generation X look like a bunch of prudes.
Since he died before Mickey Mouse was born, you can find all of his works here at project Gutenberg.
Oh - support Project Gutenberg. When works in the public domain are forgotten we all lose something precious.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Two words - "with provenance".
Paintings of nobility from the 1800's are not in short supply, they are usually valued by the reputation of the artist not the subject of the painting. It's much more likely that the dealer had no idea why geeks would be more interested than art collectors.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Got to back that up. Babbage always gave credit to Jacquard for the idea (of using cards), but his personal spin on it was to make it general purpose - to solve any problem that could be expressed in the form of an algorithm.
That's the power of the computer - the fact that it is general purpose, not single purpose.
FWIW Jacquard got the idea of using cards to control looms from earlier mechanised looms that used cylinders with raised dots - which in turn came from mechanical music organs.
"Software is too expensive to build cheaply"
In Doran Swade's book - The Cogwheel Brain - it's suggested that Ada Lovelace's influence on computer software was somewhat exaggerated. Letters from her certainly suggest she had a severely inflated ego.
As far as major role models for female software developers go I pick Grace Hopper, who is on record as having had considerable involvement in computer development, and may, or may not have coined the term "computer bug".