Happy Mutant Hall of Fame - Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace

Dr. Betty Alexandra Toole, credited simply as Betty Toole in the Handbook, has written extensively on Ada Lovelace, the Enchantress of Numbers, as noted in this article on The Well (more on The Well in a later post), and here wrote a brief overview of (one of) the first computer programmers, who saw the promise of Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, a proto-computer from the early 19th century.

Here's Betty Toole speaking at the University of Oxford's Ada Lovelace Symposium in 2015, 20 years after the publication of HMHb, and more notably, the 200th anniversary of Ada Lovelace's birth. You can find more materials from this symposium at the Internet Archive, which also hosts a digitized copy of Lady Lovelace's 64 page write-up on the Analytical Engine, including the first published computer algorithm. There's also an hour long BBC documentary on the Countess of Computing from 2015 (YouTube copy). These resources weren't available online in 1995, so now you can learn much more about this fascinating computer pioneer from the comfort of wherever you happen to be. And through a computer, of course.