The notion of Ada Lovelace as the inventor of computer programming appeals to the imagination because it contains two improbabilities and an irony. Improbability one: that computer programming, that seemingly masculine preserve, could have been invented by a woman. Improbability two: that the first program could have been written more than a century before a real computer came into existence. Irony: that this ur-programmer could have sprung from the loins of Lord Byron, who would have loathed anything having to do with a computer.
