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Hello, deep in the bowels of the Pentagon is a network of computers. They control the

US military, the most powerful army on the planet, and they are in turn controlled by a programming

language called Ada. It's named after Ada Lovelace, the allegedly hard-drinking 19th century

mathematician and daughter of Lord Byron. She became the Countess of Lovelace. In her work with

Charles Babbage on steam-driven calculating machines, Ada understood perhaps before anyone else

what a computer might truly be. Ada Lovelace has been called many things, the first computer

programmer and a prophet of the computer age, but most poetically perhaps by Babbage himself as

an enchantress of numbers. With me to discuss Ada Lovelace and her work at Doran Swade,

visiting professor in the history of computing at Portsmouth University, John Fouji,

visiting professor in biography at Kingston University, and producer Farah senior tutor at Clare

College Cambridge. Patricia Farah, Ada Lovelace who was born in 1815 to two exceptional parents,

Lord Byron and the aristocrat Anne Isabel Milbank. Can you explain the circumstances

of her birth and a bit about her early life? Well, her parents were only married for a very

brief time and only a couple of weeks after Ada Lovelace was born, Byron disappeared. I think

Anneabel Milbank acted very very courageously because she took custody of the child and that was

a very unusual thing for a woman to do in those days. She looked after Byron went abroad and

died a few years later. He never saw his daughter although he did refer to her in one of his

poems. He mentioned her blue eyes and that he would never see again. One of Anneabel Milbank was a

very very courageous woman. She was also a very domineering woman, a very intelligent woman,

and she was very interested in mathematics herself. She was determined to prevent her daughter

...