Comment on be gay, do computers
Armand1@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I don’t think he’s necessarily the inventor of the computer. There are a few possible candidates, including Ada Lovelace or Charles Babbage, who were earlier.
ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 3 weeks ago
[deleted]grue@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
That wasn’t the first bug; it couldn’t have been because the term hadn’t been coined yet. It was just the first programming mistake.
The first computer bug was found by Grace Hopper, and was caused by an actual insect that had gotten into the machine.
melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
This is a myth; the term “bug” for mistake predates the famous moth incident.
AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The pun doesn’t even make sense unless the term was already in common use when Hopper wrote it. If you don’t already know what a computer bug is, the note sounds deranged.
jason@discuss.online 3 weeks ago
Lou Gehrig was the first person to get Lou Gehrig’s disease.
ValiantDust@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
While Ada Lovelace did not actually help inventing the Analytical Engine, she was arguably a greater visionary than Charles Babbage who, as I understand it, mostly thought of it in terms of calculations.
This is what the wrote in 1842, one hundred years before the first general purpose computer was actually built (Babbage’s Analytical Engine was never built):
[The Analytical Engine] might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine…Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.
match@pawb.social 3 weeks ago
babbage: the calculator lovelace: the programming language turing: the computer science
zaphod@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
The first functioning programmable computer was Zuse’s Z3.
wewbull@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
The Z3 was relay based in 1941. (Germans)
Collosus was 1943 and based on valves. (British)
The Harvard MK1 was in 1944. (Americans)
There was a lot of parallel development going on at the time, all converging on solutions.
nightwatch_admin@feddit.nl 3 weeks ago
Blaise Pascal was the real OG: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascaline
First_Thunder@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
He’s the one who properly started computer theory, I suppose