Eli5: how did the first ever programme on the Internet come about? Don’t you need something to read the codes?

Question

Eli5: how did the first ever programme on the Internet come about? Don’t you need something to read the codes?

In: Technology

Answer 1

Good question! People have been programming long before the Internet was even a sparkle in someone’s imagination.

It all started with- believe it or not- paper!
People would punch holes in paper and read it into a scanning machine. Either the hole was punched, or it wasn’t.

This, eventually, turned into 0 and 1, and was typed in on early computers. 0 and 1, called **binary**, was the first programming language.

Binary is still used today, on every machine that reads code. We may have our fancy Java and C++ and Swift, but every single code practice all gets boiled down to a whole bunch of zeros and ones.

So to answer your question, computers that could ‘read’ 0s and 1s were already invented before the internet- and were necessary to create it!