The legacy of Ada Lovelace (2015)

(The real history of early computing is more like "OK, we can do arithmetic and logic with gears, relays, or tubes, but we need a cheaper memory device." Memory devices were a long struggle in early computing. Things tried in the early years: lots of tubes (huge and very expensive per bit), paper tape (slow), mechanical wheels (expensive and very slow), rotating wheels of capacitors (small), mercury delay lines (messy, hard to keep in sync, temperature dependent, slow), magnostrictive delay lines (same problems as mercury delay lines but less messy), Williams electrostatic storage CRTs (expensive, but the first real random-access device), magnetic drums (slow), magnetic tape(slow, but big), and finally magnetic core memory (fast, random access, but expensive). Then came RAM, and 128 bits per chip, and 1K per chip, and 4K per chip, and 16K per chip, and 64K per chip...)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thrilling_Adventures_of_Lo...

The Introduction:

"Lovelace– The Origin"

http://sydneypadua.com/2dgoggles/lovelace-the-origin-2/

The book also has a lot of real historical information, nicely interwoven in the comics with the footnotes and end-notes, and they are a joy to read too.

http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/untangling-the-tale-o...

Is actually surprisingly substantive, and addresses (among other things) the correspondence between Lovelace and Babbage while she was working on the Appendix.

she was just awarded presidential medal of freedom.

interesting article she wrote on the concept of "development before the fact"

http://www.htius.com/Articles/Inside_DBTF.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(scientist)

http://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/adalovelace/