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As a distraction to yearning for a Windows that worked as reliably as a aircraft control system written in Ada, you might like to read a new biography of the remarkable lady who gave her name to the computer language promoted and extensively used by the U.S. Department of Defense. Alas, the language never captured the imagination and enthusiasm of those Fortran programmers mining the bottomless pit of working subroutines or hooked on the C (or son of) language in which the operating system UNIX (and later Windows) was written.
In The Bride of Science, Benjamin Woolley writes a "good read" with plenty of drugs, sex, and hints of violence. He is not afraid to be liberal with speculation, mostly plausible and supported by diligent research into the substantial archives of Lord Byron and Charles Babbage.
Babbage was the inventor of the first computer, funded by the British Government at a level surprising when translated into modern values. It worked considerably worse than Windows 3.0 and failed to give Britain a century lead over the rest of the world. When it was finally completed in 1991 by the Science Museum in London, Babbage's vision was proved right but his engineering, financial, interpersonal, and project management skills proved lacking. And its speed was measured in ips rather than mips.
Lord Byron and his family, before and since, have a reputation for more than poetry -- a seam that is mined deeply by the author first to set the scene. Her mother separated from Byron when Ada was an infant and kept her away from his memory through her childhood. Adulthood was acknowledged by giving her a portrait of Lord Byron, who had died some years before in Greece. Woolley portrays Ada as a repressed Byron all her life -- most of the repressing being done by her mother whose clutches she never seemed to escape despite marrying and having three children. She died at age 37 from cancer.
The book is nicely embroidered with plenty of Byron's poetry, but very little on programs. For a deeper look into Ada's mathematical achievements, you will also need to read Dorothy Stein's biography, Ada: A Life and a Legacy (MIT Press, 1986). Ada's "big idea" was, of course, that you could not only build a calculator, Babbage's big project, but could flexibly program what it would calculate. What seems obvious to us now was such a big concept then that few understood it at all.
Ada used her position as a member of the aristocracy to rub shoulders with leading scientists and thinkers of the time, as well as quasi-religious movements that scientists now would regard as frankly cranky, and of course the leading poets like Wordsworth. Woolley uses this to give us a fascinating view of the evolution of scientific thought and etiquette that we take for granted today.
-- Paul Bristow