Comments | pmb: Ada Lovelace Day

pmb

Ada Lovelace Day

Mar 24, 2009 20:15

When you learn something about history, and you are kind of young, you tend to assume that the facts you are learning are things that everyone always knew. It's sometimes startling to find out how recently that was untrue, even among the people who should know. The example that drove this home for me was a professor of computer science in ( Read more... )

adalovelaceday

Comments 5

keystricken March 25 2009, 05:26:36 UTC

This is great, Peter. Thank you.

bonboard March 25 2009, 05:55:06 UTC

Hear, hear!

Can I also plug the Computer History Museum in Mountain View? The one that has a working replica of a Babbage difference engine and a Jacquard loom on display? That place is amazing!

Also, it's funny to think of "programming" as a tedious way of telling a machine how to produce a weave pattern using punched cards.

Hey Peter! canarasekal March 26 2009, 02:02:09 UTC

So what was her dad's name?

Re: Hey Peter! pmb March 26 2009, 06:00:48 UTC

As far as I know, his name was Capt. Douglas.

Re: Hey Peter! pmb March 26 2009, 12:33:11 UTC

We discussed timing, and came to the conclusion that he was either retiring or just-retired right around the time you graduated college, so he was much more likely to have interacted with Grandpop or Uncle Al.