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<h1>First computer program</h1>
<p>Diagram for the computation by the Engine of the Numbers of Bernoulli
Lovelace's diagram from "note G", the first published computer algorithm
In 1840, Babbage was invited to give a seminar at the University of Turin about his Analytical Engine. Luigi
Menabrea, a
young Italian engineer and the future Prime Minister of Italy, transcribed Babbage's lecture into French, and this
transcript was subsequently published in the Bibliothèque universelle de Genève in October 1842. Babbage's friend
Charles Wheatstone commissioned Ada Lovelace to translate Menabrea's paper into English. She then augmented the
paper
with notes, which were added to the translation. Ada Lovelace spent the better part of a year doing this, assisted
with
input from Babbage. These notes, which are more extensive than Menabrea's paper, were then published in the
September
1843 edition of Taylor's Scientific Memoirs under the initialism AAL.</p>
<p>Ada Lovelace's notes were labelled alphabetically from A to G. In note G, she describes an algorithm for the
Analytical
Engine to compute Bernoulli numbers. It is considered to be the first published algorithm ever specifically tailored
for
implementation on a computer, and Ada Lovelace has often been cited as the first computer programmer for this
reason. The engine was never completed and so her program was never tested.</p>
<p>In 1953, more than a century after her death, Ada Lovelace's notes on Babbage's Analytical Engine were
republished as an
appendix to B. V. Bowden's Faster than Thought: A Symposium on Digital Computing Machines. The engine has now been
recognised as an early model for a computer and her notes as a description of a computer and software.</p>
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