History
Who was the first computer programmer?
The short answer
Ada Lovelace, in 1843, nearly a century before the first working computers. In her notes on Charles Babbage's proposed Analytical Engine she wrote out a step-by-step method for the machine to calculate a sequence of numbers, which is widely regarded as the first computer program. The engine itself was never completed.
Charles Babbage spent decades designing the Analytical Engine, a steam-powered mechanical computer with a memory, a processor and punched-card input, in the 1830s and 1840s. It was a sound design. It was also enormous, expensive and never finished, so for a hundred years it existed only on paper.
Ada Lovelace, a mathematician and the daughter of the poet Lord Byron, translated a French article about the engine in 1843 and added her own notes, which ended up three times longer than the article. In the last of them she laid out, operation by operation, how the engine would compute a sequence called the Bernoulli numbers. That table of operations is the program.
Her notes also contained the bigger idea. Babbage saw a machine for arithmetic. Lovelace saw that anything that could be written as symbols, music included, could in principle be handled by such an engine. She was describing general-purpose computing a century before anyone built a computer to run it on. Programming, it turns out, is older than computers.
Source
- Ada LovelaceComputer History Museum