her enduring fame. Ada called herself "an Analyst (& Metaphysician)," and the combination was put to use in the Notes. She understood the plans for the device as well as Babbage but was better at articulating its promise. She rightly saw it as what we would call a general-purpose computer. Her Notes anticipate future developments, including computer-generated music. When inspired Ada could be very focused and a mathematical taskmaster. Ada suggested to Babbage writing a plan for how the engine might calculate Bernoulli numbers. This plan is now regarded as the first "computer program." A software language developed by the U.S. Department of Defense was named "Ada" in her honor in 1979.After she wrote the description of Babbage's Analytical Engine her life was plagued with illnesses, and her social life, in addition to Charles Babbage, included Sir David Brewster (the originator of the kaleidoscope), Charles Wheatstone, Michael Faraday and Charles Dickens. Charles Dickens supposedly once said to Ada stop haunting me. When she was thirty-three, Ada spent some time in Brighton with Charles Dickens. Soon afterwards (February 18, 1849), he wrote her that strange things were happening at his hotel. He wondered whether Ada was "haunting" him, and if so: "I hope you won't do so." Three years later, Dickens visited Ada at her deathbed. He was one of the last non-family members, other than herHer interests ranged from music to horses to calculating machines. She has been used as a character in Gibson and Sterling's the Difference Engine, shown writing letters to Babbage in the series " The Machine that Changed the World" and I have gathered her letters and writings in "Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers: A Selection from the Letters of Lord Byron's Daughter and Her Description of the First Computer Though her life was short (like her father, she died at 36), Ada anticipated by more than a century most of what we think is brand-new computing....
