Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmerJUN 18 2010

Charles Babbage built one of the first mechanical calculating machines but Ada Lovelace was the first to show how the machine's arithmetic function could be abstracted to produce things other than numbers: language, graphics, or music.

There are several other Information Pioneers shorts available on Vimeo, including profiles of Tim Berners-Lee, Alan Turing, and Hedy Lamarr.