How was the first computer software created, without computer software to create it?

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How was the first computer software created, without computer software to create it?

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The very first “programming languages” were literal instructions for the computer, in a binary format. This is nearly unusable for humans, so it got very soon replaced by human-readable instructions that translated 1-to-1 to these binary instructions. Stuff like:

1 Load the value at 0x1234 into 0x5678
2 Increment the value at 0x5678 by one
3 Do an AND-Operation with the value at 0x5678 and the value at 0x1234
4 Jump to instruction 2

These Instructions can be transformed into binary code with basically a look-up-table, and the binary code is then used by the computer

Every programming language since is abstracting from that directly interpretable code, and can be translated into it.

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