Finally, a Computer for Women - Petticoat 5

Marketing Computers for Women in the 80’s. The 1980’s were a bit strange sometimes. This is from an episode of BBC America’s Look Around You show, in which the show unveils the world’s first computer for women, the Petticoat 5, with tissue dispenser and emery board space bar and meet its inventor, played by Belinda Stewart-Wilson. Decades ago, it was women who pioneered computer programming — but too often, that's a part of history that even the smartest people don't know.

Ada Lovelace, also known as the Countess of Lovelace, born in 1815. Walter Isaacson begins his new book, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, with her story.

Augusta Ada, Countess of Lovelace, was the daughter of poet Lord Byron. The computer language ADA was named after her in recognition of her pioneering work with Charles Babbage.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images

"Ada Lovelace is Lord Byron's child, and her mother, Lady Byron, did not want her to turn out to be like her father, a romantic poet," says Isaacson. So Lady Byron "had her tutored almost exclusively in mathematics as if that were an antidote to being poetic."

Lovelace saw the poetry in math. At 17, she went to a London salon and met Charles Babbage. He showed her plans for a machine that he believed would be able to do complex mathematical calculations. He asked Lovelace to write about his work for a scholarly journal. In her article, Lovelace expresses a vision for his machine that goes beyond calculations.

She envisioned that "a computer can do anything that can be noted logically," explains Isaacson. "Words, pictures and music, not just numbers. She understands how you take an instruction set and load it into the machine, and she even does an example, which is programming Bernoulli numbers, an incredibly complicated sequence of numbers."

Babbage's machine was never built. But his designs and Lovelace's notes were read by people building the first computer a century later.

The women who would program one of the world's earliest electronic computers, however, knew nothing of Lovelace and Babbage.

Music: The Inventor by Dhruva Aliman
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