October 7th is Ada Lovelace Day- a day for celebrating women in science and technology.
Who was Ada Lovelace? The first computer programmer. Ada Lovelace worked with Charles Babbage on the mechanical computer in the 1840s and wrote the first program, an algorithm for processing by the computer (more on this story and on Ada here: Ada Lovelace on Wikiepdia ).
The Ada Lovelace Day was started in 2009 to raise the profile of women in science, technology, engineering and maths. The idea is for folks to blog about women in those fields who are inspiring.
My favourite woman pioneer in technology is Grace Hopper. Hopper helped program the Harvard Mark I computer, developed the first compiler, and invented the COBOL programming language (still in use today).
While she was working on a Mark II Computer at Harvard University in 1947, her associates discovered a moth stuck in a relay and thereby impeding operation, whereupon she remarked that they were “debugging” the system. Though the term “Computer bug” cannot be definitively attributed to Hopper, she did bring the term into popularity.
You can find more on Grace Hopper here: Grace Hopper on Wikipedia.
First documented computer bug below.
