The Queen praised two computing trailblazers using a tablet at London’s Science Museum.
Queen Elizabeth II celebrated two computing trailblazers Thursday in her first ever Instagram post. Sent from a tablet at London’s Science Museum, the post features a letter from Victorian computer pioneer and polymath Charles Babbage.
Ahead of International Women’s Day Friday, the image’s caption highlights Ada Lovelace, often regarded as the world’s first computer programmer. Lovelace created programmes for Babbage’s proposed “Analytical Engine,” which he described in the letter sent to the Queen’s great-great-grandfather, Prince Albert.
Friends and colleagues, Babbage once wrote that Lovelace threw “her magical spell around the most abstract of Sciences and has grasped it with a force which few masculine intellects (in our own country at least) could have exerted over it,” according to The New York Times .
In her own writings, Lovelace noted that devices like the Analytical Engine had possible applications far beyond crunching numbers.
