Nick G.’s Reviews > Dreaming in Code: Ada Byron Lovelace, Computer Pioneer > Status Update

It just occurred to me that Ada Lovelace did all that she did while constantly being on opium that she had been prescribed for a chronic illness. Victorian medicine was wild.

Seeing as Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine (one of the first computers) would've needed to be 500 feet long to compute 1000 variables, I'm sure people in the mid-1800s would've been amazed by modern semiconductors. Nowadays, we can compute billions of variables in a matter of milliseconds with a four-square-inch chip.

I couldn't imagine having three young children and still trying to study advanced math.

Lady Byron, Ada Lovelace's mother, took her to meet high-class men when she was 17 so that she could find a husband. While there, Ada met Charles Babbage, inventor of the Analytical Engine, the first design for a computer (as well as many other revolutionary devices). For a second, I thought they would be perfect partners, then I remembered that Ada was 17 and Babbage was 41. Welcome to the 1800s!

I can't believe what being a child to a rich family must have been like in Victorian England. Ada Lovelace basically had no friends for her entire childhood.

Ada Lovelace was pretty much the smartest kid I've ever heard of. She was learning first-grade topics before she was five years old.