FINAL ESSAY

"I have travelled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing’s is a fad that won't last out the year."
- The editor in charge of business books for Prentice-Hall, 1957

Computers have grown and shrunk in size. In a bygone era it was thought impossible that a machine could be capable of such things as processing, printing and accessing the world. Today, it is another story. As a culture, the human race relies and is most oblivious to the dependency which is placed on a machine. However, this essay will discuss the significant roles which Ada Lovelace and William Gibson had on the revolutionary computer.

Ada Byron, countess of Lovelace was born in London on December 10, 1815. She was tutored in mathematics and music .Though intellectual noblewomen were not encouraged in the 19^th century it was mathematic which really caught Lovelace’s attention.

In a nine-month period in 1842 to 1843 Charles Babbage, an English mathematician, philosopher and mechanical engineer, enlisted Lovelace to translate the  article Notions sur la machine analytique de Charles Babbage (1842)which Italian mathematician, Louis Menebrea published regarding Babbage’s most recent invention the “analytical engine.” It was on this project where Lovelace dedicated her skills and knowledge, making notes and appending them to the back of the original article. [O’conner, Robertson , 2002]

After the article was published in Richard Taylor’s Scientific Memoirs Volume 3 in 1843, Charles Babbage made comment that:

“These two memoirs taken together furnish, to those who are capable of understanding the reasoning, a complete demonstration - That the whole of the developments and operations of analysis are now capable of being executed by machinery.”  [Babbage 1864 p. 317]

From these notations was where Ada Lovelace claimed her fame. According to Toole [1992 p. 286] Lovelace declared;

“The distinctive characteristic of the Analytical Engine, and that which has rendered it possible to endow mechanism with such extensive faculties as bid fair to make this engine the executive right-hand of abstract algebra, is the introduction into it of the principle which Jacquard devised for regulating, by means of punched cards, the most complicated patterns in the fabrication of brocaded stuffs. It is in this that the distinction between the two engines lies. Nothing of the sort exists in the Difference Engine. We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.”

Though Bubbage’s machine was never created during his lifetime, further studies conducted by The London Science Museum constructed a perfectly functioning ‘difference engine’ from Babbage’s original plans in 1991. [2010] This reflects the importance which Lovelace had, as her notations were in fact the programming algorithms for the machine.  It was from these notes that Ada Lovelace was coined the first computer programmer as the algorithms she noted were concluded they could program a machine (the difference machine) inevitably a computer to carry out such commands. [Baum, 1986]

 Jumping forward a somewhat 100 years to the 20^th Century, William Gibson an American-Canadian writer, a fore-front to the insight of the technologies surrounding computers coined the term “cyberspace.”

Cyberspace defined to its most simplest is the Internet “a computer network consisting of a worldwide network of computer networks that use the TCP/IP network protocols to facilitate data transmission and exchange.” [Princeton University,2010]

William Gibson was a student at the University of British Columbia where he then went on to write his debut novel the Neuromancer which envisaged cyberspace. It was this novel where Gibson created an iconography for the information age, prior to the revolution of the internet being revealed in the 1990’s. [Poole,2003]

Cyberspace at the time when Neuromancer was first published  it held an insight to the futuristic possibilities that the computing world may have. It could be considered that Gibson planted the seed for such a form that without his novel the internet may not be what it is today.

At the time that Gibson published Neuromancer computer systems were a technology that people thought a pure privilege, even a novelty. However it has come to, in today’s 21^st century society, the ideals of a computer become much more present and necessary in running what one could consider the world.

Gibson [1984] defined cyberspace in Neuromancer as  “A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.” 

Considering the gigantic leap that this essay has entailed highlights the dramatic difference and advancements in technology for today’s computer systems. Though both these characters have neither created the actual device, it was through their determination and their individual mindset which drove them to discover and hypothesise what is now a modern and much underappreciated mechanism.

Comparatively Ada Lovelace was in a time where modern computers where on the brink of discovery. Through her optimism and determination it was inevitable that the basic ‘Difference Machine’ would revolutionise. According to Toole [1992 p. 287] Lovelace spoke of the basic computer doing more than just counting figures;

“Again, [the Difference Engine] might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine . . . Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent”

It is comparable that though separated by time both Ada Lovelace and William Gibson had an eye for technology, an eye that would see them steer the modern world into developing and creating a device which is now so common it is neither revolutionary nor eye-boggling. However, it can be concluded that without these two significant leaders and pioneers in the development of the computer and surrounding technologies, a world which is so dependent on computers and cyberspace may not have advanced and boomed in such a way.

Babbage, C, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, London, 1864.

Baum, J. The Calculating Passion of Ada Byron. Archon Books, 1986.

Toole B A, Ada, the enchantress of numbers : a selection from the letters of Lord Byron's daughter and her description of the first computer, Mill Valley, California, 1992.

Hook, Diana H.; Jeremy M. Norman, Michael R. Williams, Origins of Cyberspace: a library of the history of computing, networking and telecommunications, Norman 2002.

Noah Shachtman, 23 May 2008, Pentagon Define, Wired, viewed 19 October 2010, http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2008/05/pentagon-define/

O’conner, J, Robertson, E, August 2002, Ada Lovelace a history, viewed 19 October 2010, http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Biographies/Lovelace.html

Steven Poole, 3 May 2003, William Gibson, Guardian UK, viewed 19 October 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/may/03/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.williamgibson

Word Net Web, 2010, Princeton Univeristy viewed 19 October 2010, http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=cyberspace