Jean Jennings (left) and Frances Bilas set up the ENIAC in 1946. Bilas is arranging the program settings on the Master Programmer, photo courtesy of University of Pennsylvania.

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Here is a brief excerpt from an article by Laura Sydell for National Public Radio in which she discusses one of the several fascinating accounts provided in Walter Isaacson’s recently published book, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. To read the complete article, check out other resources, and learn more about NPR (especially what you can do to support it), please click here.

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If your image of a computer programmer is a young man, there’s a good reason: It’s true. Recently, many big tech companies revealed how few of their female employees worked in programming and technical jobs. Google had some of the highest rates: 17 percent of its technical staff is female.

It wasn’t always this way. 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.

I took a trip to ground zero for today’s computer revolution, Stanford University, and randomly asked over a dozen students if they knew who were the first computer programmers. Almost none knew.

“I’m in computer science,” says a slightly embarrassed Stephanie Pham. “This is so sad.”

A few students, like Cheng Dao Fan, get close. “It’s a woman, probably,” she says searching her mind for a name. “It’s not necessarily [an] electronic computer. I think it’s more like a mechanic computer.”

She’s thinking of Ada Lovelace, also known as the Countess of Lovelace, born in 1815. Walter Isaacson begins his new book, The Innovators, with her story.

“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.

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Here’s a direct link to the complete article.

Laura Sydell fell in love with the intimate storytelling qualities of radio, which combined her passion for theatre and writing with her addiction to news. Over her career she has covered politics, arts, media, religion, and entrepreneurship. Currently Sydell is the Digital Culture Correspondent for NPR‘s All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Weekend Edition, and NPR.org. To learn more about her and her work, please click here.