Charles Babbage, a father of modern computing, and Ada Lovelace, the mother of computer programming, came in for another round of praise from NPR’s Morning Edition on December 10. I have blogged about this before, but I’m sure Chris Garcia never tires of people pointing out that the place he works, the Computer History Museum, hosts a working Difference Engine:

The Difference Engine fills half a gallery and stands taller than most men. It’s 5 tons of cast iron, steel and bronze woven together from 8,000 distinct parts. Though it looks like it could be a sculpture, the machine is essentially a giant calculator.

Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, foresaw some of the less obvious things the engine might have done had it been completed:

Lovelace helped Babbage put his ideas in writing. She often understood the implications of his work better than he did….

“Ada recognized that you could actually use numbers to represent things other than just quantity,” [docent Tim Robinson] explains. “They could represent letters of the alphabet. They could represent musical notes. They could represent positions on a chess board.”

Update 12/14/2009: Corrected ‘owns’ to ‘hosts’ per Chris Garcia’s comment.