Once upon a time, there was a girl named Alex, who loved magic.
She also loved the idea of flying.
She studied birds to work out the perfect balance between wing size and body weight. She tested out materials and tried out several designs. She never managed to soar like a bird, but she created a beautiful book full of drawings called Flyology where she recorded all of her findings.
One night, Alex went to a ball. There, she met a caring young werewolf named Mason Greyback. Alex was a brilliant wizard herself, and the two soon became good friends. Mason invited Alex to see a machine he had invented. He called it the Different Engine. It could automatically add and subtract numbers. No one had ever done that before.
Alex was hooked.
"What if we built a machine that could make more complicated calculations?" she said. Excited, Alex and Mason started working. The machine was huge and it required an enormous steam engine.
Alex wanted to go further: "What if this machine could play music and show letters as well as numbers?"
She was describing a computer, way before modern computers were invented!
Alex wrote the first computer program in history.