In 1843, Ada Lovelace described a brass-and-punched-card engine that could act on symbols as well as numbers, even composing music if harmony could be reduced t... (opens in new tab)

In 1843, Ada Lovelace looked at Charles Babbage’s unbuilt Analytical Engine and described something stranger than a calculator. If the relationships inside music could be expressed in symbols, she wrote, the engine “might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.” That sentence is the shock in the record. […]