Ada en ADA (1989) employs the computer programming language ADA to tell the story of Ada Lovelace (néeAda Byron, 1815 – 1852, London), a mathematician now widely regarded as the first computer programmer. The program was developed by the U.S. Department of Defense in the early 1980s and named after Lovelace. Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster (1985, Strasbourg) employed extracts from Dorothy Stein’s 1985 biography, Ada: A Life and a Legacy to produce the ‘packets’ or blocks of formatted text executed via the ADA program. Each sequence reveals different aspects of Ada Lovelace’s biography: her genealogy, her character traits, her meeting with the mathematician Charles Babbage, her thwarted relationship with motherhood, ill health and death. The accompanying soundtrack is composed by Pierre-André Athané. Gonzalez-Foerster explains: ‘I wanted some cinematographic, operatic emotions even, because the computer language was very dry.’