Born in London on Dec. 10, 1815, Augusta Ada Byron worked with the algebraist Charles Babbage in the late 1830s on his Analytical Machine. During their later collaboration, she affixed eight footnotes to a translation of a study of his Difference Machine that an Italian mathematician had published. The footnotes consist of the first computer programs, which cemented her claim as the first published computer programmer.

Ada Byron met Babbage when she was 17 years old, and had already been forced to commit her life to what she called "poetical science." She was the only legitimate daughter of the great Scottish poet, Lord Byron. Her mother threw out her husband when Ada was only six months old because of the scandal of his illegitmate daughter. Anxious that her daughter not follow in the Byronic tradition, Lady Byron kept Ada on a strict educational diet of science and math.

As an adult, Lady Ada weaned herself from an opium addiction, but not one to gambling, with which she quietly and secretly bankrupted her husband, the Count of Lovelace. When she and Babbage collaborated on the Difference Machine, it was in order to bet successfully on horses. Lady Ada should probably be given credit for the scheme: Babbage's vision for his computing machines was limited to mathematics, while she prophesized that it would be used for everything from writing music to drawing. She died at 36, as had her father, and was buried next to him in the family vault.

Eugene Eric Kim and Betty Alexandra Toole published a May 1999 article on Ada Byron's contribution, "Ada and the First Computer," which can be bought from the Scientific American. Other books and articles are also available as listed in the AdaIC's bibliography.