Lovelace’s insight marks a profound conceptual leap that wouldn’t be formalized until the work of Alan Turing a century later: Fundamentally, computation involves the manipulation of symbols according to rules. There’s no limit on what those symbols can represent. This idea is built into Turing’s mathematical model of computation, and it originated with Lovelace. We take for granted today that the same bits of 0s and 1s encode every type of media—text, images, audio, video—but it’s hard to fathom that this future was envisioned before the first computer had even been built.