Lady Lovelace

Lady Lovelace

In 1843 Ida Lovelace wrote some notes for an article
Words of advice on how to use an analytical engine
Actually instructions three times longer than the article itself
Demonstrating how to write computer programs she told the world
What she did was relate numbers and symbols to each other
People and machines progress and production all at once

Pride and prejudice shut her down like water on a fire
Lord Byron the poet her father championed the Luddites
The inventor wasted all the funding the machine was never built
He told his friends how smart she was as good as a man
She told him she should run the engine and the company
He would make the machines as his dreams were true
He told her that was impossible that could never happen
Men said that women were physically unable not just mentally
To carry out mathematical computations in their heads

In reality people are physically incapable of understanding reality
Watching jacquard looms running on computer punch cards
She envisioned everything modern computing machines can do
While all around the world educated men inventors visionaries
Only saw adding machines and looms making corporation T-shirts

One hundred years before her notes were taken seriously by a man
Her notes on operating computers are the same now as it was then
Would have changed the world entirely upside top to bottom
If she hadn’t been the only one to know what it all meant
She seriously warned people and still today people don’t listen
In a world ruled by confusion and muddled thoughts called reality
That what machines create is never the same as what we think