It was the conditional jump that brought Ada's gifts as a logician into play. She came up with yet another instruction for manipulating the card-reader, but instead of backing up and repeating a sequence of cards, this instruction enabled the card-reader to jump to another card in any part of the sequence, if a specific condition was satisfied. The addition of that little "if" to the formerly purely arithmetic list of operations meant that the program could do more than calculate. In a primitive but potentially meaningful way, the Engine could now make decisions.

Babbage would write letters to editors about street noise, and half the organ-grinders in London took to serenading under Babbage's window when they were in their cups.

A seventeen-year-old Englishman by the name of George Boole was struck by an astonishing revelation while walking across a meadow one day in 1832. The idea came so suddenly, and made such a deep impact on his life, that it led Boole to make pioneering if obscure speculations about a heretofore unsuspected human facility that he called "the unconscious."

The earliest idea that I can trace in my own mind of calculating arithmetical tables by machinery rose in this manner: One evening I was sitting in the rooms of the Analytical society at Cambridge, my head leaning forward on the table in a kind of dreamy mood, with a Table of logarithms lying open before me. Another member, coming into the room, and seeing me half asleep, called out, "Well, Babbage, what are you dreaming about?" To which I replied, "I am thinking that all these Tables (pointing to the logarithms) might be calculated by machinery."

On the one side are scientists and engineers, who would always yearn for a device to take care of tedious computations for them, freeing their thoughts for the pursuit of more interesting questions. On the other side is the more abstract desire of the mathematical mind to capture the essence of human reason in a set of symbols.

Shortly before Babbage died he told a friend that he could not remember a single completely happy day in his life: 'He spoke as if he hated mankind in general, Englishmen in particular, and the English Government and Organ Grinders most of all.'

If McLuhan was right about the medium being the message, what will it mean when the entire environment becomes the medium?

What is unusual is that all the computer patriarchs seem to have been preoccupied with the power of their own minds.

Claude Shannon, who later invented information theory, found Boole's algebra to be exactly what the engineers were looking for.

When Charles Babbage applied his new method of analysis to a study of the printing trade, his publishers were so offended that they refused to accept any more of his books.

Because syllogistic logic so closely resembles the thought processes of human reasoning, Boole was convinced that his algebra not only demonstrated a valid equivalence between mathematics and logic, but also represented a mathematical systematization of human thought.

Teenage George Boole suddenly saw a way to capture some of the power of human reason in the form of an algebra. And Boole's equations actually worked when they were applied to logical problems. But there was a problem, and it wasn't in Boole's concept. The problem, at the time, was that nobody cared. Partly because he was from the wrong social class, and partly because most mathematicians of his time knew very little about logic, Boole's eventual articulation of this insight didn't cause much commotion when he published it. His revelation was largely ignored for generations after his death.

While the rest of the party gazed at this beautiful invention with the same sort of expression and feeling that some savages are said to have shown on first seeing a looking glass or hearing a gun, Miss Byron, young as she was, understood its working and saw the great beauty of the invention.