The first computer program was written in 1843, roughly a hundred years before a machine existed that could actually run it. The programmer was Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, better known today simply as Ada Lovelace. Working from the designs of Charles Babbage's proposed Analytical Engine, she wrote out a step-by-step method for a machine to compute a sequence of numbers automatically. It is one of the most remarkable leaps of imagination in the history of technology, and it sits quietly behind every line of firmware running on a connected device today.
A program for a machine that was never built
In the 1830s and 1840s, the English mathematician Charles Babbage designed the Analytical Engine, a mechanical general-purpose computer driven by punched cards and powered by steam. It was never finished in his lifetime, but its design was startlingly modern: it had a "store" (memory) and a "mill" (a processor), and it could be programmed to follow different instructions depending on the data.
In 1843, Ada Lovelace translated an Italian article describing the engine and, crucially, added her own set of notes that ran far longer than the original paper. In the section labelled Note G, she laid out a detailed algorithm for computing Bernoulli numbers on the engine. Because it was a complete, machine-executable sequence of operations designed to run on a computer, that note is widely regarded as the first published computer program, and Lovelace as the first computer programmer.
She saw further than the machine itself
What makes Lovelace's contribution extraordinary is not just the algorithm, but her grasp of what a computer fundamentally is. Babbage thought of his engine mostly as a very fast calculator. Lovelace went a step further and realised that if a machine could manipulate numbers according to rules, it could in principle manipulate anything that could be represented by numbers, including symbols and even music. That single insight, written more than a century before the first electronic computers, is essentially a description of general-purpose computing. Every device that turns sensor readings, audio, or text into numbers and processes them is living proof that she was right.
Why a 19th-century idea still matters for IoT
It is tempting to file this under trivia, but the thread running from 1843 to a modern microcontroller is very real. Writing firmware for an IoT device is the same core discipline Lovelace was practising: expressing a precise, unambiguous sequence of instructions so that hardware does exactly what you intend, with no room for guesswork. On a tiny chip like an ESP32, you also inherit the same constraint she faced with a mechanical engine, which is that resources are limited and every operation has a cost. Efficient, carefully ordered logic is not a luxury; it is what keeps a battery-powered sensor alive for months.
Her Bernoulli algorithm also demonstrated loops and the reuse of intermediate results, ideas that map directly onto the control loops and state machines at the heart of embedded programming. When an engineer today writes code that reads a temperature sensor, decides whether to act, and repeats the cycle thousands of times a second, they are working in a tradition Lovelace helped begin.
From concept to connected product
For teams building connected products here in the Philippines and across the region, the lesson is encouraging. Great software has never depended on having the newest or most powerful hardware. Lovelace designed a working program for a machine made of brass gears. What mattered was clear thinking about the problem and precise expression of the solution. The same is true when a startup or a student team turns a thesis prototype into a shipping product on modest, low-cost silicon.
At Fluidwire we build IoT and web services from silicon to cloud, from firmware on the board to the dashboard your users log in to. If you have an idea that needs to travel from a sketch to a real connected device, get in touch with our team and let us help you write its first instructions.
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