Today is Ada Lovelace Day.
Look, if you really want to honor ancient women in technology, Ada is getting tired. She didn’t invent anything, she was just a writer who explained Babbage’s invention and saw some of its potential. Babbage wasn’t the main source of modern computing anyway. Calculators with decimal dials were widespread a century earlier, and the overall field developed in many different directions before and after Babbage. He was written into the history later, just as the “foundation” of math was jacked under the real structure of math in 1895.
Three less tiring choices:
Mariam al-Ijliya, a Syrian woman who developed and built astrolabes around 900AD.
Lizzie Sthreshley, a blind woman who invented a successful and profitable Braille machine.
Mary Jameson, a blind woman who mastered and evangelized the Optophone, and carried its torch into an era when its unique tech was able to spawn a new industry of OCR. Parallel to Ada but more heroic.
Polistra's Mill 