BASIC
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(Small edits) | (→A Brief History of Programming) | ||
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== A Brief History of Programming == | == A Brief History of Programming == | ||
| − | There is plenty of dispute about who should be rightly called the first computer programmer, but many have awarded this designation to Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace. She was brought up by her mother and educated extensively in mathematics and logic so that she might avoid becoming a poet like her father, Lord Byron. The struggle to keep computation apart from poetics and aesthetics, instead of allowing them to mingle as they do in 10 PRINT, has a long history. | + | There is plenty of dispute about who should be rightly called the first computer programmer, but many have awarded this designation to Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace. She was brought up by her mother and educated extensively in mathematics and logic so that she might avoid becoming a poet like her father, Lord Byron. It turns out that the struggle to keep computation apart from poetics and aesthetics, instead of allowing them to mingle as they do in 10 PRINT, has a long history. |
| − | Her contributions as an early "programmer" can be found in her translation of and notes to an Italian article about Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine by Louis Menebrea. In this work, completed in 1843, she envisioned the Analytical Engine as a general-purpose computer and described an algorithm that could be used to output Bernoulli numbers. Although the computer Lovelace programmed was never built, and there is evidence that the algorithm in question was originally written by Babbage, Lovelace's project was important to the modern idea of the computer program. This earliest concept of a program was of an algorithm specified in mathematical notation. | + | Ada Lovelace's contributions as an early "programmer" can be found in her translation of and notes to an Italian article about Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine by Louis Menebrea. In this work, completed in 1843, she envisioned the Analytical Engine as a general-purpose computer and described an algorithm that could be used to output Bernoulli numbers. Although the computer Lovelace programmed was never built, and there is evidence that the algorithm in question was originally written by Babbage, Lovelace's project was important to the modern idea of the computer program. This earliest concept of a program was of an algorithm specified in mathematical notation. |
The computer programs that followed in the electromechanical and early electronic age of computing were quite a bit less intelligible, with a much less direct relationship to familiar symbols. The ENIAC, a fully electronic computer built at the University of Pennsylvania from 1943 to 1945, was programmed initially by plugging in an elaborate set of cables (da Cruz). To run particular calculations, constants were then set using dials. | The computer programs that followed in the electromechanical and early electronic age of computing were quite a bit less intelligible, with a much less direct relationship to familiar symbols. The ENIAC, a fully electronic computer built at the University of Pennsylvania from 1943 to 1945, was programmed initially by plugging in an elaborate set of cables (da Cruz). To run particular calculations, constants were then set using dials. | ||
