[mafribe]

   Lovelace was probably the first to think 
   about using it for something other than 
   pure computation.

This is deeply misleading. For example the idea to have automata make music, and more generally for automata to be creative, predates Lovelace, Music making automata were a staple of the renaissance. For example the mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler, when visiting the "Kunstkammer" of Rudolf II in 1598, was amazed at an automaton representing a drummer who could "beat his drum with greater self-assurance than a live one" [1]. Incidentally, Kepler corresponded with Wilhelm Schickard on the latter's "arithmeticum organum", the first ever proper mechanical calculator (could do addition, subtraction, multiplication and division). Automating creativity was very much an idea with much currency in the renaissance. Indeed some of the key advances in mechanical automata, which later evolved into computers, where driven by the desire to automate creativity [2]. The "conceptual leap" that some people lazily ascribe to Lovelace, wasn't hers! Using numbers to represent syntax (what you lazily attribute to Lovelace too) is much older and can be found for example in Leibniz's 1666 "Dissertatio de arte combinatoria", where one finds a detailed exposition of a method to associate numbers with linguistic notions. I have no idea if Leibniz was the first to do this. Leibniz also built some early calculators/computers, and is thus a cornerstone of the tradition that lead to the emergence of computers. This tradition was known in Babbage's time, and most likely to Babbage.

[1] W. Zhao, Rendering the Illusion of Life: Art, Science and Politics in Automata from the Central European Princely Collections.

[2] D. Summers Stay, Machinamenta: The thousand year quest to build a creative machine.

[jonsen]

I don't think that is what is meant by "be the first to" here. I'm no expert in english, but in my native language the analog expression could mean "if somebody would think of X, she surely would".

[jessriedel]

I don't think that applies to English. As I read it, the sentence is definitely a claim of priority.

[Twisol]

There's a crucial distinction between "would be" and "was". You'd be correct if the sentence used "would be", but "was" is very definite.