Hello,

BBC Radio 4 has a weekly show called "In Our Time". This week they're profiling Ida Lovelace, Lord Byron's daughter, who many of you will remember from reading "The Difference Engine". Here's the blurb:

quote:

Deep in the heart of the Pentagon is a network of computers. They control the US military, the most powerful army on the planet, and 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. In her work with Charles Babbage on a steam driven calculating machine, 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’.

It's good stuff, and will provide more of a background context to "The Difference Engine" if you're interested.

Podcast is available from iTunes or direct from the BBC, should be up for a week or so.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime.shtml

Cheers,
B

Heard the trailer this morning. Her father left the country just one month after she was born and never saw her again. Both died, aged 37 I believe.

Looks to be a heartening, not just a computing show.

Interesting programme. It does seem that Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage did develop the concept of the stored program computer with some inspiration from Jacquard. As usual, a Great British Invention was left unused for 100 years or so, though those interested in computation such as Turing, were continuously aware of Ada Lovelace's notes.

Great stuff. I'd like to hear Patricia Farrar expand on what she was saying about Herman Hollerith.

Well, Hollerith started the punched card stuff quite early on for a US census, wasn't it?

I hit computing in the mid-60s, and the route from Hollerith to the stored program computer was much more obvious then than it is now.

Hollerith invented some early machines - card sorters, collators and tabulators. The cards in commonest use were 80 column 12 row square hole variety. But there were also Powers Samas 65 column round hole cards, and at least two varieties invented by IBM in the 60s to try and steal part of what was then a pretty universal market for Hollerith cards.

Sorters took a pack of cards in any old order and sorted them on one column. A column could be punched in one or more of 12 rows.

Collators took two stacks of cards in sorted order and merged them.

Tabulators basically printed stacks of cards, but they could also do subtotals and headings.

Collators and Tabulators could be programmed to an extent by plug boards.

Basically this tabulator technology was ideal for business and accounting purposes, and it persisted from 1896 or so. IBM, Burroughs and ICL, the big business machine people, were direct descendants of Hollerith, not digital computer technology.

Punched cards and tabulators persisted right through to the mid sixties, when the new digital computers were appearing. Punched cards were the favourite input medium before terminals. There was also punched paper tape, descendant of Telex and machine tool programming.

All us programmers punched our programs up on cards or punched them on tape. We all became very proficient at card surgery. It was a hassle to re-punch an 80 column card for one duff column if you could re-punch the duff column and then fill in the wrong holes with CHAD (yes, that's what chad was). At one point ICL confiscated all our hand punches to stop the loose chad problem. My wife Beryl could punch 18000 columns an hour, and did so during several big projects, the last being in 1972. I can still read a punch card by holding it up to the light, the way some people can read bar codes.

Anyway, I think it's misleading to label Hollerith as anything other than a contributor to the computer revolution, though it's true that had he not enriched all the big office machinery companies with their tabulators, they wouldn't have been able to afford to develop the computers of today, and we'd still be stuck with university and defence ivory towers computing prime numbers and missile trajectories, and we might never have had the personal micro.

Beryl could punch 18000 columns an HOUR?!?

Jezuz, that's five a second.