Eli5: How did people teach the first code to machines before code existed?

Question

Eli5: How did people teach the first code to machines before code existed?

In: Technology

Answer 1

Computers are machines, and machines do the thing they are designed to do when you press a button.

Computers are machines which can do many different things, so they have a lot of buttons connected to all those different things.

We never ‘taught’ computers to read code, rather we just wired all those buttons together and built a system in which we could write down all the button presses in order so that the computer does a more complicated thing- like those pianos that play themselves.

Then we built a computer for which one of the things they could do was interact with that button reading system, so there’s now a button for “go back five buttons” and a button for “if something looks like this, skip the next button”, among others.

Now we can write complex code, and never taught the computer anything- we simply designed it with built in commands.