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TIL that the first computer programmer was a woman. Her name was Ada Lovelace. (www.britannica.com)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/til@lemmy.ca
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[–] 64 points 3 years ago (2 children)

Forget that, most of the first computers were women.

Google it. A 'computer' was a person employed to perform computations, and was a profession which generally employed women

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  • [–] 15 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    And this is the reason people in IT often refer to computers as "machines", because at some point they started to replace the people doing the computations, and they needed to differentiate.

    (At least that's the story I've heard)

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  • [–] 10 points 3 years ago

    It's also to differentiate the physical hardware from e.g. a VM with a given chunk of compute that you've rented from a cloud provider.

    In other words, one "machine" may host more than one "system" or "instance", so it's a useful bit of differentiation on that end as well.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Wow, that's wild. First time I've heard that. So a Virtual Machine is an instance of this?

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    • [–] 6 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    TIL that she was the daughter of the poet Byron

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    • [–] 5 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    NVidia tarnished the name this generation.

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