Argh! I missed it–unsurprising, since I’ve been deluged with work and email, and since I also spent more than an hour after a long string of classes today, helping some students figure out how to find an angle for their article for the magazine we’re working on. (So if I haven’t replied to an email, it’s coming soon, dear reader/correspondent.)
Well, Nalo and Jetse both blogged for the occasion, among, I’m sure, many others.
But I did not let Lady Lovelace go unnoticed on her special day: when one of my students claimed (today, in Media English) that the “first computer” was the Eniac, we had a little talk about how “computer” used to mean people who did computations, and touched on abacuses, slide rules, and then people Babbage, Ada Lovelace, the world’s first computer programmer, and Alan Turing. (Eniac was “the first general-purpose electronic computer,” says Wikipedia. Those adjectives mean something, and most of the students’ English is good enough to grasp the fine points of that difference.)
(The fact that the “first programmer” was a woman seemed to impress some of the students in the class–a class mostly made up of women–though in all honesty Turing’s sad fate seemed to surprise–and shock–them somewhat more.)