Gates worked as a programmer in high school, so he was aware that the practice of selling software was not new. IBM was a long standing company by that point that made money writing software for businesses. The first example of a person making money from machine instructions was Jaquard (1804) who encoded his instructions on punch cards and fed them into weaving machines to create pretty patterns. So graphics programmers came first.
IBM didn't sell software until the consent decree forced them to, and Jacquard cards (or dobby patterns for that matter) are uncompressed graphics files, not programs to generate graphics algorithmically. Many machines in the 1950s used Williams-tube memory and drove additional visible CRTs from the signals, so every program was a graphics program. But that was a century after Lovelace.
Jacquard and dobby patterns were generally created by employees of the loom owner.
