The woman who saw the future …

… Bryan Appleyard — Ada’s Long Revolution. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Babbage’s machine was the first to produce abstractions — arithmetical solutions — from mere matter, which is exactly what human brains do all the time. Lovelace saw the significance of this; furthermore, she foresaw the laptop and the smartphone in her understanding that this was a universal machine and future versions would be programmed to do anything.