No Love for Lovelace: A Closer Read of Walter Isaacson’s Innovators

By Eileen Pollack on Jezebel, shared by Meg Neal to Gizmodo

I’m glad Walter Isaacson is getting such an outpouring of love from reviewers and talk-show hosts for including Ada Lovelace in The Innovators, his new history of the digital revolution.¹ Thanks to Isaacson, Lovelace is finally receiving at least a few bytes of the attention she deserves for having written the first computer algorithm—a century before the first electronic computer was up and running. He also devotes a chapter to Grace Hopper, a Navy rear admiral who, a hundred years later, invented the first compiler so programs could be written in words rather than in numbers, and the six female mathematicians who designed the software for the first generally programmable computer.

…