How was the first computer programmed? With what? How does it know 1 means yes and 0 means no?
In: Technology
1 means yes and 0 means no is a convention. A lot of functions in standard libraries, for example, return 0 for failure (essentially “no”). Inside the implementation of a processor, you often encode yes or no in whatever way minimizes the local logic (maintaining “1 means yes” might require extra transistors to implement). This isn’t visible to the programmers, but is to other people working on the design. For example, some hardware uses “active high” reset (reset is true when the wire is high (1)) and some hardware uses “active low” reset (reset is true when the wire is low (0)). Both work just fine, all that matters is that everyone designing logic agrees what the interpretation of those voltages on those wires means.
You can make a computer with ropes and pulleys. It’s just difficult to program because you have to physically adjust everything.
The computer doesn’t have a meaning for anything. We’re the ones giving meaning. It just so happens that some physical processes are greatly analogous to our mental processes we call math.
We’ve figured out ways to represent information in a way that can be manipulated by these same processes.
Crazy to think that the first computers were programmed with just 1s and 0s! Those numbers represent on/off states in circuits, and that simple concept is what powers all the complex computing we have today.
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