While Ada Lovelace did not actually help inventing the Analytical Engine, she was arguably a greater visionary than Charles Babbage, who, as I understand it, mostly thought of it in terms of calculations.
This is what she wrote in 1842, one hundred years before the first general purpose computer was actually built (Babbage’s Analytical Engine was never built):
[The Analytical Engine] might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine…Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.
While Ada Lovelace did not actually help inventing the Analytical Engine, she was arguably a greater visionary than Charles Babbage, who, as I understand it, mostly thought of it in terms of calculations.
This is what she wrote in 1842, one hundred years before the first general purpose computer was actually built (Babbage’s Analytical Engine was never built):