Ada Lovelace: The visionary from 1843 who invented code (and inspired Apple)

Did you know that the very first computer program in history was written a century before the first computer appeared?

The year is 1843. There’s no electricity, no screens, no silicon. Yet, Ada Lovelace, daughter of the poet Lord Byron and a mathematician mother, is about to change the world by translating a scientific article for the « Scientific Memoirs » journal.

What she would add to it would forever change our relationship with technology.

« Note G »:

The Official Birth of Code Ada was then working with Charles Babbage on his « Analytical Engine » project (a mechanical ancestor of the computer). While translating the work of engineer Luigi Menabrea, she added her own annotations, which turned out to be three times longer than the original text.

It’s in the famous « Note G » that history takes a turn. Ada detailed, step by step, a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers with the machine. This wasn’t a simple equation; it was a logical sequence of conditional instructions. It was the first algorithm.

Ada Lovelace never saw the machine work (it was never finished during her lifetime), but she managed to program it virtually through the sole power of her mathematical abstraction.

Stronger than calculation:

The Intuition of AI But Ada’s genius lay not only in the « how, » but in the « why. » Where Babbage saw a super-calculator, Ada saw a universal machine capable of manipulating symbols.

In her « Note A, » she wrote a stunning prophecy for the 19th century, anticipating digital creation and AI:

« The machine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any length or degree of complexity. »

She understood, 100 years before anyone else, that if music or art could be converted into mathematical data, the machine could become a creator. A vision that would be debated by Alan Turing himself in his foundational article on artificial intelligence in 1950.

From « poetical science » to the iPhone

Ada called her approach « Poetical Science. » She refused to separate imagination from scientific rigor.

This philosophy is the direct legacy that Steve Jobs instilled in Apple. Isaacson, Jobs’ biographer, explicitly links this vision to the creation of the Macintosh. Jobs often repeated that Apple was at the « intersection of technology and the liberal arts. »

Like Ada, he knew that code is not an end in itself, but an instrument for imagination.

What we learn:

Ada Lovelace’s story reminds us of an essential truth for any modern digital project: technique alone is not enough.

Whether for a complex Cloud architecture or a sleek UX interface, true innovation always stems from a human and creative vision.