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T A B L E__T A L K What's the dream operating system for cruising the Internet? It's another Mac vs. Windows go-round in the 21st area of Table Talk   Search and ye shall find -- personal health, family wealth and bibliophilic happiness at barnesandnoble.com Search by:  Keyword Title Author     ____________________ Technology news from Will telcos kill the video store? ____________________   R E C E N T L Y "E-mail is a real revolution" By Kyra DuPont and Eric Pape For a Cambodian opposition leader, the Net is a lifeline (03/15/99) "Wing Commander" creator takes the director's chair By Howard Wen Chris Roberts talks about his passage from the little screen to the big screen (03/12/99) Beauty and the geeks By Janelle Brown Female technology execs face cruel choices about selling their own sex appeal (03/11/99) Amazon vs. the ants By Scott Rosenberg Sure, David can beat Goliath on the Web -- if he's got a New York Times columnist in his corner (03/10/99) How can they patent that? By Peter Wayner The torrent of patents for e-commerce schemes raises new questions about an old-fashioned system (03/09/99) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE 21ST FEATURES ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - -

......A Victorian countess is widely credited today as the first ....programmer -- but historians say that doesn't compute. BY MICHAEL MATTIS Augusta Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace, mathematician and English society hostess, daughter of the poet Byron, is today revered as something of a prophet. She's been the subject of at least three biographies, numerous articles, essays and, most recently, a movie starring Tilda Swinton. By one account, visitors to Ada's grave outnumber those to her father's. That's not as surprising as at first it seems: Today, technology means more to most people than poetry, and Ada's fame derives from her collaboration, in the 1840s, with Charles Babbage -- the cantankerous intellectual who tried, and failed, to build what might have been the world's first computer, the Analytical Engine. For her work with Babbage, Ada has recently been granted such grandiose monikers as "the world's first programmer," "the mother of computing," "the mother of the modern computer," "inventor of the first computer language" and "mathematical genius." She's been distinguished by the United States Army, which named its universal programming language Ada in her honor in 1983. The book "1,000 Years, 1,000 People: Ranking the Men and Women Who Shaped the Millennium" ranks Ada at number 960, coming in for the show right behind John von Neumann's 959. (Babbage himself galloped ahead of both to place at number 351. Bill Gates got lost in the backstretch.) She was even profiled in the official companion book to last year's Lilith Fair. She's frequently portrayed as a sexual libertine, a compulsive gambler and a drug addict who despised her children -- a veritable one-woman Thelma and Louise of primitive computation. "Cyberfeminists" like Sadie Plant, author of "Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + the New Technoculture," hold her up like a torch, a Byronic martyr to the struggle against a brutal and oppressive patriarchal technocracy who was intentionally "disappeared" from history. The image of Ada Lovelace has coalesced into a potent and popular myth, one in which a complicated personality from the 19th century gets boiled down into an archetype for the dispossessed of the 20th. This Ada is wild and powerful and alluring. There's only one problem: According to the experts, she's a fiction. "This romantically appealing image," writes one scholar, "is without foundation." It's the Ada Myth that drives "Conceiving Ada," a film directed by U.C. Davis arts professor Lynn Hershman Leeson. The plot is a kind of fusion between cyberpunk and historical drama, with a nod to "Our Bodies, Ourselves." Emmy (Francesca Faridany) is a computer genius living with her shaggy boyfriend Nick (J.D. Wolfe) in a groovy Multimedia Gulch warehouse. Somehow, Emmy programs her computer to look into the past, through which she voyeuristically watches actress Tilda Swinton do her brooding "Orlando" bit as the ill-starred supergenius, Ada. As Emmy looks into the past, the audience is treated to snippets of a decidedly '90s version of Ada's life struggles against 19th century sexism, laudanum addiction and compulsive gambling, not to mention her own unstoppable intellect. Eventually, Emmy conceives -- and thanks to Nick's meddling with Emmy's computer, out pops a "cybergenetic" clone of Ada herself (Rose Lockwood). Leeson's Ada, like Plant's, is a misunderstood genius -- a woman born 160 years before her time. She understands Babbage's machines better than Babbage, encrypts her scarf with ciphers with which to secretly transmit bets to the racetrack, hobnobs with Mary Shelley, is alternatively wild and sullen -- maybe even bipolar -- taking lovers on a whim and battling the patriarchy in the meantime. Leeson insists that everything in her film concerning Ada is based in fact. She credits "Ada, Enchantress of Numbers: Prophet of the Computer Age," a collection of Ada's letters and biographical notes by science historian Betty Alexandra Toole, as a major source. "It's all true," says Hershman. "It's a fantasy," counters Toole. "Lynn tells a story which fits her needs as a filmmaker." Toole also takes umbrage at Plant, who, she says, used her work as a source to draw a similarly questionable caricature. Given the textual record, Toole says she's hard-pressed to figure out why modern people insist on making Ada into a revolutionary, a wanton, a gambler and a druggie. But she does note that in today's Foucaultian academic world, transgression is the mode du jour. "It's what we have come to," she says. "It sells books and movies." It also buys tenure. N E X T_P A G E .|. Will the real Ada Lovelace please stand up?