When we think of modern coding, we think of Python and Rust and Swift and Ruby and so on.
My question is more abstract. How exactly did computer scientists develop the original language used to tell a computer what to do and when to do it? How did they teach the computer to recognize that langauge?
Going even further than that, how did current languages get developed? Did they just rewrite the original computer code from scratch or are all modern computer languages designed to communicate with this baseline original code which all computers were programmed with?
In: Technology
Waaay back it came from music—player pianos. A long roll of paper with tiny rectangles punched in it that “told” the piano what to play. That morphed into punch cards/tape that were used to enter information into a computer. Then they were able to be stored on magnetic tape strips just like cassettes but usually giant. My first computer ran on cassette tapes.
At the base level, it is all logic gates. The basic kind, OR, AND, NOT, XNOR etc. you can actually make logic gates with mechanical switches. Now CPUs do it electronically. programming languages really translate higher level instructions to machine language which the processor can understand. There are various levels of translations (for want of a better word), that convert your syntax into instructions that the processor can understand. It didn’t happen overnight. Back in the day programmers worked in syntax that was quite close to machine language. Over a period of time, they became more and more complex. It is all incremental improvements that resulted in what we have today where you can post a cat picture on a whim.
All of these are good answers, but there’s something missing : How did they actually *write* the code, for example, to interpret the inputs from the first ever keyboard ?
The answer is punched cards. You would encode information into the card by “punching” tiny holes into it, and the computer would read the cards, not unlike what others are saying. It was the only form of input computers would have, because they were manufactured specifically for it.
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