 |
|
|
  |
|
.
|
|
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
____________________ Technology news from
R E C E N T L Y "E-mail is a real revolution" "Wing Commander" creator takes the director's chair Beauty and the geeks Amazon vs. the ants How can they patent that? - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE - - - - - - - - - -
|
REPURPOSING ADA | PAGE 1, 2
Reading Ada's letters, as published in Toole's book, we're treated to a very different Ada. This one is a mother who alternatively loves and loathes her children; is often (but not always) fond of her husband via an arranged marriage; enjoys dogs and horses and ice skating in winter; has a gift for math and the poesy to articulate its complexities; enjoys a good party (especially in the company of other scientific minds), the theater, the opera and, on occasion, betting the ponies. She is also a Victorian countess -- a proud one -- who is nevertheless struggling to find a "useful" profession between, in and around her social and domestic duties. This Ada also may (or may not) have had affairs with a number of men, including Charles Dickens. She's a woman who died young and in pain from a disease doctors were helpless to treat, except to prescribe laudanum, cannabis and even mesmerism to relieve her suffering. In short, the Ada that comes through in her letters is not a myth but a whole person. The core of the Ada Myth lies in her alleged role as the Analytical Engine's "programmer." Ada met Babbage, 43 and already a widower, at a party in 1833. Just 17, she had a talent for mathematics and an enthusiasm for science -- having been drilled by her domineering mother, Lady Byron, since early childhood. As intellectual fellow travelers, the two quickly hit it off. Later, Babbage showed Ada the still-incomplete invention he would work on for a decade, a calculating machine he called the Difference Engine, created to execute flawless mathematical tables. Ada watched rapt as the wheels, rods and gears of the brass and pewter machine turned, accurately raising numbers by orders of magnitude and extracting the root of a quadratic equation. She was rapt but not dumbstruck; her grasp of the machine's principles of calculating differences was immediate and articulate, and Babbage recognized it. She was so taken with the machine that her mother would later write that Ada considered the Difference Engine "a friend." It was also the beginning of a friendship between Ada and Babbage that would last until Ada's untimely death of uterine cancer 21 years later. Unfortunately for both, Babbage so loved tinkering with his work that he could never let go of it -- he had what science fiction writer Bruce Sterling describes as "hacker's disease." After 10 years' work and having burned through 17,000 pounds of the British government's money, he abandoned the unfinished Difference Engine (already in version 2.0) for an even grander scheme, the Analytical Engine. For all its utility, the Difference Engine had been little more than a glorified adding machine, able to add one plus one plus one, ad nauseam, though in relatively rapid succession compared to a person armed with pencil and paper. The Analytical Engine, by contrast, would be able perform any calculation, utilizing punched cards for operations and variables -- similar to the electronic computers of the early 1950s. "Functionally, the Analytical Engine was just like modern machines," says William Aspray, co-author of "Computer: A History of the Information Machine" with Martin Campbell-Kelly. "But it had essentially no storage capability compared to today's computers, and its speed was a few calculations a minute." A decade after Babbage began the Analytical Engine, it was still on the drawing board, owing to troubles with his engineer, his own stubbornness and the government's unwillingness to spend any more on his radical schemes. In 1842 an Italian military engineer, L.F. Menabrea (later Italy's prime minister), published his "Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage Esquire." Delighted, Babbage asked Ada to translate the document into English and, under his guidance -- the extent of which is not precisely known -- add some notes of her own, which wound up three times longer than the original manuscript. Babbage was so impressed by the "Notes," as they've become known, that he urged Ada to redraft and publish them in separate volume. Ada wouldn't hear of it. She knew too well Babbage's mania for tinkering, and argued that if her "Notes" were not published immediately, they might never be. It's from the "Notes" that Ada's "programmer" reputation comes. Together the "Sketch" and the "Notes" describe the Analytical Engine and how routines might have been run on it, had it ever been built. Is there an actual computer program tucked away in the "Notes"? In them, did Ada invent a programming language? Is Ada, then, entitled to wear the badge of "first programmer"? "Absolutely not," says Betty Toole. "Ada certainly did not invent a computer language." Toole says Ada's immediate and substantive contributions lay in differentiating the Analytical Engine from its predecessor, using easy-to-read tabular format, and adding indices much like those in a modern computer program. (Toole has co-authored an article slated to appear in the May Scientific American on this topic.) Other scholars, like the University of Sydney's Allan Bromley, won't give Ada even that much credit. "All of the programs cited in her notes," he writes, "had been prepared by Babbage from three to seven years earlier." Toole insists the "Notes" were a close collaboration between Ada and Babbage and says her Scientific American article will support that view. Furthermore, Toole says, Ada's contributions went beyond the merely quantifiable, into the metaphorical. Ada had as keen a flair for turning a phrase as she had a talent for mathematics. In the "Notes" she speaks of the Analytical Engine weaving "algebraic patterns just as a Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves." Her "Notes" also predict that, given the right algorithms, calculating engines might compose music and create graphics. She even presaged Alan Turing and the "garbage-in, garbage out" effect, saying, "The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate any thing. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform -- it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths." "She didn't write any programs," says Martin Campbell-Kelly, Aspray's co-author. "But she didn't have to write them, in my opinion. I think it's pretty impressive to do what she did." Like Toole, Campbell-Kelly honors Ada as a pioneer, if not a programmer as the term is understood today. Bruce Sterling, co-author of the speculative "steampunk" novel, "The Difference Engine," with William Gibson, which theorizes a world overtaken by Babbage's machines, chalks up the current Ada Myth to the contemporization of history -- what the critic Harold Bloom famously called "misprision." "Everybody has to remake the past in their own image," Sterling says. "Hollywood does it all the time. There's a 1930s Queen Elizabeth, a '40s Elizabeth, a '50s Elizabeth. Now there's an androgynous, '90s Queen Elizabeth." "It's like Charles Lindbergh -- did he invent manned flight?" Sterling
continues. "I don't think so. He made one particular bold, headline-seizing
adventure and was idolized forever after. I see Ada as being in that same
sort of position. She happened to write the first ever documentation on
what it meant to be computer programmer." Michael Mattis is associate editor at Business 2.0 magazine and a frequent contributor to Icon.
|
Arts & Entertainment | Books | Comics | Life | News | People
Politics | Sex | Tech & Business | Audio
The Free Software Project | The Movie Page
Letters | Columnists | Salon Plus
Copyright © 2000 Salon.com All rights reserved.
