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The question of who wrote the first computer program is more contested than it appears. Charles Babbage designed the Analytical Engine in the 1830s-1840s, a mechanical general-purpose computer with a CPU-like Mill, memory Store, and punch-card programming inspired by the Jacquard Loom. Ada Lovelace, a mathematician, translated an Italian engineer's French account of the engine and added extensive notes — including Note G, which contained a step-by-step algorithm to compute Bernoulli numbers using loops, memory, and conditionals. This is widely cited as the first computer program. Babbage had written programs in his notebooks earlier, but they were unpublished and incomplete. Ada's work was the first fully articulated, publicly published algorithm. Babbage himself acknowledged Ada caught an error in his own attempt at the Bernoulli computation. The most accurate framing is a collaboration: Babbage built the conceptual machine, Ada wrote the first real program for it.