THE DISCOVERY · 1843 · LONDON
Ada Lovelace boots the first computer, 1843
In 1843 Ada Lovelace published the first program ever written — for a machine that existed only on paper, because Parliament would not pay for it. This is the timeline where the Treasury said yes, and the computer age began ninety years early, in brass.
1843 · THE WORKSHOP
The machine existed. It simply existed as ink: thousands of drawings of a brass mind the size of a locomotive, designed by Charles Babbage and understood, at full depth, by exactly one other person on Earth — Ada Lovelace, twenty-seven, Byron’s daughter, who had just published a set of Notes proving what the engine could be. The British government had already spent seventeen thousand pounds on Babbage’s engines and lost patience. In our timeline it stopped there. In this one, the Treasury letter that autumn contains a different sentence, and Parliament buys two warships fewer.