"Ada saw something that Babbage in some sense failed to see.... that number could represent entities other than quantity. So once you had a machine for manipulating numbers, if those numbers represented other things, letters, musical notes, then the machine could manipulate symbols of which number was one instance, according to rules. It is this fundamental transition from a machine which is a number cruncher to a machine for manipulating symbols according to rules that is the fundamental transition from calculation to computation" 
-- Wikipedia article on Ada Lovelace

The neat thing about Lovelace's envisioning the possibility of general computation (in 1843!) is that she got the idea from noticing that punch cards controlling threads on a loom to create a pattern were essentially like punch cards to program a calculation machine.  The men she worked with were better educated, but none of them saw the true potential of what they were doing.  Google knows why it needs diversity.