Lovelace and Turing

Recently I have been watching several documentaries on various technological advances in history. These documentaries have been part of a digital season on the BBC. They have made me realise why the sector I am studying is such a great one which will lead the world into a new age of technology, much like it did one hundred years ago. There are many people throughout history which have influenced the technology we have in today's world, but I would like to focus on just two in this post. Lovelace and Turing.

Firstly, Ada Lovelace was one of the first people in history to touch on computer technology. She was born and lived in the 1800's, and loved nothing more than science, maths and logic. She was a daughter of a rich family and because of this, she was invited to a small party hosted by Charles Babbage. He had something very innovative to show his guests. He created part of a machine called the difference engine which computed values of polynomial functions. When showing this to his guests the only one who spotted its potential was Ada. She worked with Babbage for years after this to design a bigger, better machine called the analytical engine. This is where she came into her own, and what she is most famous for. Inspired by the cards used to weave looms in the factories, she created, what we see as the worlds first computer program. She was never able to test this though as the analytical engine was never completed. I wont go into the details as to why but she started the idea of a machine being in two states. In the sense of the cards she was working with, it was either a hole punch or no hole punch. Or better known today as on or off, the basics of binary. Along with Babbage, they also came up with the idea of conditional branching. The idea that the computer program can make a decision on which path to take depending on what a variable is equal to. This is still used in computing today.

Turing living 100 years after Lovelace and only discovered her papers years after he started his own work in the war. Turing was inspired by the work of Lovelace and realised they had many of the same ideas. He worked with a team of mathematicians who created the bombe, which was a machine which helped crack German coded letters in World War 2. This machine looked for patterns in the code and once it had found them, the team were able to crack the letters for that day. (This was because the Germans changed the cryptography each day) Alan Turing and his team saved countless lives and were one step ahead in the war effort, he and the team were the ultimate reason Britain won the war.

To me, these two people in history shaped the future of computing and contributed to what we have today. Turing was one of the first people to build a working computer to do something more than basic addition, even if it was still the size of a whole room. Ada also inspires me as in the 1800's, men and women were not seen as equals and weren't even allowed to do things such as handle money. To do what she accomplished is amazing in those years, and even more so for a woman. I guess it almost showed the world that a women can do the same intellectual work as men, or more. Even if she was not able to test her program.

Thank you for reading my post, it means a lot.

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