‍Many fields of science have a foundational document: Isaac Newton’s Principia for the physics of classical mechanics, for example, or Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species for evolutionary biology. But only computer science can claim its foundation hides in endnotes.
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, better known as Ada Lovelace, was commissioned in 1842 to translate a paper about the world’s first general-purpose computer. She appended her own annotations, which ran three times longer than the original article and completely eclipsed it in terms of technical meat and philosophical insights. The impressive foresight they reflected established her as the first person to envision the universal capabilities of computers that we take for granted today.
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