littlemissmutant:nrdvsgk:A friend just pointed us towards this incredible web comic that we are 210%
littlemissmutant:nrdvsgk:A friend just pointed us towards this incredible web comic that we are 210% behind. Follow Ada Lovelace (inventor of the algorithm, pretty much) and Charles Babbage (inventor of the difference engine) in the thrilling adventures of early computing. It’s all done by Sydney Padua. Ada Lovelace was the only legitimate child of mad, bad, and dangerous to know poet and nutcase Lord Byron.Her mother Anabel fled the exploding planet her husband yet worried that Ada had inherited his wild blood.ANABEL: Ada must be saved from becoming poetical! Only one thing can subdue poetry… ANABEL: Mathematics!!(a wide-eyed baby Ada reads a book titled “ADVANCED CALCULUS”)Ada’s mother hired the finest mathematicians and scientists of the age to turn her into a human calculating machine!!Meanwhile, in his secret laboratory, Charles Babbage is working on the radical non-human calculating machine…CHARLES: No one has the intellect to grasp the genius of my difference engine!!CHARLES: Short-sighted fools!!!MINION: Didn’t they give you that huge grant that you then used for a totally different machine that you also didn’t build?CHARLES: Silence, minion!Then, at a party in 1833, fate intervened…CHARLES: Nobody understands me…ADA: Astounding!! ADA: In enabling mechanism to combine together general symbols in successions of unlimited variety and extent, a uniting link is established between the operations of matter and the abstract mental processes of the most abstract branch of mathematical science!!!CHARLES: Eh?!ADA: A new, a vast, and a powerful language is developed for the future use of analysis, in which to wield its truths so that these may become of more speedy and accurate practical application for the purposes of mankind than the means hitherto in our possession have rendered possible!!CHARLES: Yes, yes exactly!!OTHER PARTYGOER: Hey look, we’re present for the invention of the geek.ADA: This must be twittered!(she prepares to tap out a 140-character message on her paper fan)ADA: Wait, this is a fan.ADA: Suddenly, there is a gaping hole in my life of which I was hitherto unaware.In collaboration with Babbage, Ada produced, in theory, the first computer programme…Some sort of math thing for the next-gen analytical engine which I don’t understand.Unfortunately, Ada died at only age 36, and Babbage never did build any of his calculating engines…The next steps in computing were not taken until the 1930s. Babbage’s engine was finally built in 1991, you can see it at the Science Museum in London.(switch to steampunk art style occurs here)OMG, that’s so boring! What actually happened was, Babbage and Lovelace successfully developed the computer in the mid-1830s (giving humanity the necessary technological advantage to repel the alien invasion of 1898), and used their combined powers to fight crime and have adventures!!Although they did have a somewhat idiosyncratic view of what constitutes “crime”.CHARLES: Street music!!!ADA: POETRY. -- source link