How was the first computer programmed? With what? How does it know 1 means yes and 0 means no?
In: Technology
It depends on your view of what a computer and a program are. Here’s a list of things people generally consider to be machines running programs:
1. As early as the 9th century, a programmable music sequencer was invented by the Persian Banu Musa brothers.
2. In 1206, the Arab engineer Al-Jazari invented a programmable drum machine where a musical mechanical automaton could be made to play different rhythms and drum patterns.
3. In 1801, the Jacquard loom could produce entirely different weaves by changing the “program” – a series of pasteboard cards with holes punched in them.
The first computer program is generally dated to 1843 when mathematician Ada Lovelace published an algorithm to calculate a sequence of Bernoulli numbers, intended to be carried out by Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine. However, Charles Babbage himself, wrote his first program for the AE in 1837.
In the 1880s, Herman Hollerith invented the concept of storing *data* in machine-readable form. Later a control panel (plug board) added to his 1906 Type I Tabulator allowed it to be programmed for different jobs, and by the late 1940s, unit record equipment such as the IBM 602 and IBM 604, were programmed by control panels in a similar way, as were the first electronic computers. However, with the concept of the stored-program computer introduced in 1949, both programs and data were stored and manipulated in the same way in computer memory.
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