Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace, was the daughter of the poet, Lord Byron.

At a dinner party Ada heard of Charles Babbage's ideas for a new calculating engine, the Analytical Engine. She was was so taken with the idea that letters between Babbage and Ada flew back and forth filled with fact and fantasy.

Ada predicted that such a machine might be used to compose complex music, to produce graphics, and would be used for both practical and scientific use. She was correct.

She also produced what is now regarded as the first "computer program." A software language developed by the U.S. Department of Defense was named "Ada" in her honor in 1979. Like her father, she died at 36, having anticipated by more than a century most of what we think of as 'modern' computing.