Meet Ada and Grace

Virtual Museum Guides

The Museum's digital twin sisters, Ada and Grace, can't wait to tell you all about themselves and the Cahners ComputerPlace exhibit! They work there in the "InterFaces" booth — the hub of the exhibit's computing, robotics, and communication technology — and they love helping visitors connect with areas that match their interests.

Ada is imaginative and playful, and dedicated to pursuing her interest in communications technology. She sometimes finds it hard to contain her excitement about the hands-on activities in Cahners ComputerPlace. This can frustrate her sister, Grace, who thinks it's more important that visitors get the facts. Grace specializes in computers and robotics, but despite her preference to remain practical, her love for her work slips into her conversations. Above all else, the twins enjoy sharing their interests with Museum visitors and exploring how these interactions can teach them more about the way real humans communicate.

Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper

The twins' namesakes are Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper, two women who are famous for their accomplishments in computing. Ada Lovelace (1815 - 1852) was the daughter of the famous English poet, Lord Byron. Top-notch mentors guided her early love of mathematics and tremendous aptitude. Despite her family's standing (and in some ways, because of it), her gender made pursuit of a higher education in the sciences possible only through covert means; Ada's notes on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine were signed with just her initials, "A.A.L." However, these notes transcended the discrimination against their author — they accurately predicted a general use computer that would not be seen for another 100 years.

Harvard University Archives, call # UAV 605.270.1.2, Box 4, U-822

A century later, Grace Hopper (1906 - 1992) enlisted in the Naval reserves and was sent to Harvard to work on the Mark I — designed by professor Howard Aiken to be the modern embodiment of Babbage's Analytical Engine. By this time, she had already earned master's and doctorate degrees at Yale and been appointed a professor in mathematics at Vassar — accomplishments that were still extremely rare for a woman. Grace also learned computing on the fly, helping write its rules along the way (not many existed when she started). Her approach of cataloguing error-free code to generate subroutines for new code lead her to create the first compiler — the first of her many achievements in the field that helped standardize computer programming, making it accessible to the masses.

The real Ada and Grace were instrumental in making computing technology approachable, understandable, and a source of creativity that everyone is welcome to explore. Our virtual Museum guides who share their names are dedicated to continuing this pursuit.