How were computers “commanded” before computer languages existed?
In: Technology
Define computer language and computer.
If you want to be really technical, computer used to be a profession humans did, rather than being a machine.
The first computer language was telling Dave to add these two numbers together and divide them by whatever Larry came up with and so on.
When it first started, an electronic computer did one thing, it had wires attached to the logic gates.
To make it do something different, you had to pull out all the wires and basically rebuild the entire computer.
Later on, rather than rebuilding the computer they just made it really easy to pull out the wires and plug them in differently.
Later on, instead of pulling out the wires, they just made it so you flicked a few switches so the wires would connect differently. This is probably where you could argue where the modern computer language existed.
Later on, they had the machine flip the switches based on holes punched in a card.
Later on, they had a machine read what you wrote and make the holes for you (though by then some of them weren’t even physical holes anymore)
Later on, they had a machine read what you wrote, and re write it so a bunch of specific machines could punch their specific holes.
And that’s a modern programming language.
At the end of the day a CPU op code is just an set of switches for a CPU.
Assembly language is translated in those codes.
And a modern high-level language gets translated into assembly language.
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