Re:What Did Ada Lovelace's Program Actually Do? (2018)
by JohnMakin on Monday December 16, 2024 @02:58PM
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Programmable looms (which used a type of punchcard) such as the Jacquard Loom had existed for a little while - if I recall she specifically referenced this as inspiration for some of her ideas. Not trying to diminish how impressive her work was, but I do believe some form of primitive mechanical computation had already been done for a little while.
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Re:What Did Ada Lovelace's Program Actually Do? (2018)
by int_19h on Monday December 16, 2024 @03:40PM
(#42435181)
Jacquard loom was indeed well-known, and one of the sources of inspiration for Babbage, but it is still fundamentally about designing a system around a specific task - the cards directly encode operations on hooks.
What Ada is saying here is that, once you have a machine that let you do generic operations on numbers, you can use it to do all kinds of non-math stuff so long as you can come up with ways to encode other things as numbers (= finite sets of symbols). This was not at all obvious to other people who worked on the Engine, including Babbage himself.