Ada Lovelace: Prophet of the computer age [audio 43min]

Deep in the heart of the Pentagon is a network of computers. They control the US military, the most powerful army on the planet, and are in turn controlled by a programming language called Ada. It's named after Ada Lovelace, the allegedly hard drinking 19th century mathematician and daughter of Lord Byron. In her work with Charles Babbage on a steam driven calculating machine, Ada understood, perhaps before anyone else, what a computer might truly be. Ada Lovelace has been called many things -- the first computer programmer and a prophet of the computer age -- but most poetically perhaps by Babbage himself as an 'enchantress of numbers'. Presenter Melvyn Bragg investigates the history of ideas and debates their application in modern life with his guests Patricia Fara, Fellow of Clare College and an Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University; Doron Swade, Visiting Professor in the History of Computing at Portsmouth University; and John Fuegi, Research Fellow in Media and Gender Studies at the Universities of Stanford and Maryland. Baron Bragg -- historian, journalist, novelist -- is Controller of Arts for London Weekend Television.