Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art

fertile imagination remained intact, along with her phenomenal analytical talents, making
her a great exemplar of the power of an integrated mind. The story goes that Lovelace
eventually heard about Babbage’s analytical engine at a dinner party in 1834, and was
quite taken by the idea. She saw many potential applications for the powerful engine,
when most everyone else did not, including the wild possibility of having the machine
compose music and even generate graphics. Babbage and Lovelace developed a correspondence,
and she eventually wrote a document to Babbage suggesting a plan to have
the engine calculate Bernoulli numbers. There is no simple way to explain Bernoulli numbers,
so I’ll just say that they are quite significant in mathematics—here’s a link if you’re
interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli_numbers. The plan, or algorithm,
that Lovelace wrote to Babbage is now regarded as the first computer program—100 years
before the invention of the computer! (How cool is that?)
In spite of Babbage and Lovelace’s prescient work, computing history went nowhere for
nearly 100 years. It wasn’t until the mid-1930s that German engineer Konrad Zuse developed
the Z1 (see Figure 1-8) and got credited with developing the first computer.
Figure 1-8. The Z1 was a mechanical computer created by Konrad Zuse in 1937. A reproduction of
this machine (pictured) is currently housed in the Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin.
Between the ’30s and mid-’40s—thanks in part to the very unfortunate need for things like
firing tables and atomic bomb calculations—numerous modifications were made to the
Z1, and other significant computer initiatives were begun, including John Atanasoff’s ABC
computer, the Mark 1 at Harvard, and the ENIAC at Penn (see Figure 1-9). These initial
machines were very difficult to program, and the Mark 1 and the ENIAC were absolutely
enormous. The Mark 1 was 51 inches long, 8 feet high, and contained 17,486 vacuum
tubes. The ENIAC weighed in at 30 tons and used so much power that it was said to cause
the lights of Philadelphia to flicker.
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