Programmer Buys Original Ada Lovelace Painting On eBay 86
An anonymous reader sends the story of the rediscovery of an original painting of Ada Byron at about age 4, the girl who was to become Countess Lovelace and the world's first computer programmer. A US Army sergeant in Tajikistan caught wind of an eBay auction of a 180-year-old painting of Ada Byron, with provenance; he notified a programmer buddy in Texas, who won the auction.
suspicious? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:suspicious? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sorry (Score:5, Insightful)
But Jacquard wasn't programming a computer - he was programming a loom. Not that we're not indebted to him, but a loom is not a computer.
Re:suspicious? (Score:5, Insightful)
A real provenance needs to make specific reference to the article and have specific and traceable details about the past owners. This looks to be just a quick history of the painter, if it was the correct painter. There is nothing that directly relates to the painting or who the painting is of.
As for the subject I presume they would of done a quick search of the subject, the painter, Frank Stone ARA, is fairly famous for his painting and mainly for being the father of Marcus Stone. Marcus was really famous in his time and was a close friend of Charles Dickens. Any search for Ada Byron links right to a history of her. So you have a painter who has some name recognition and a named subject who is easy to research; tie that in with a tech savy, sells on ebay(tech savy may be a strech) but aleast is capable of doing some searching.
BTW, what was the final selling price for this?
Re:Sorry (Score:1, Insightful)
Hence we may never know whether she was the first programmer or merely the first tech author.
However - as others have pointed out - WRITING software is only a small part of what a programmer does. Someone who merely writes programs but doesn't have to debug them is not yet a true programmer.