Ada Lovelace sketched what we’d now call “software” long before electronic computers existed.

Augusta Ada King (Countess of Lovelace) translated a paper about Babbage’s Analytical Engine and added long notes that include a step-by-step recipe for computing Bernoulli numbers — often called the first program. She also argued that machines could manipulate symbols and follow general rules, not just crank numbers. Decades later a programming language was named Ada in her honor — so her name still shows up in code today.