History of Computer Programming, Part 1

Humans have been using machines to get things done for a long time. However, they haven't been able to program those buggers to do those things automatically until relatively recently.

Though I haven't done a tremendous amount of reading on the subject, it appears most computer historians agree the first legit programmed machine was Joseph Marie Jacquard's textile loom, which would weave according to templates defined by a series of punched cards.

Somewhat later, Herman Hollerith struck upon the real value of punched cards for basic computing in order to solve a major national problem. See, by 1980 the United States was growing at such a rate that the constitutional mandate to record and process a national census every ten years was approaching the line of impossibility. Since the results had to be counted and processed by hand, the interval between census and result was exceeding the ten year limit! Quite the problem.

Well one day, Hollerith is sitting on the train, watching the conductors issue tickets. He sees how they are recording basic information about each traveler by hole-punching the ticket. Then, all of the sudden, "punch!" went the conductor's machine and "ding!" went Hollerith's brain: ah ha!

Hollerith realized that, given the proper material and the right electronic apparatus, the information recorded on a punch card could be "read" and processed by a machine. This would work well with counting operations especially. Hmmm, what major national crisis needed some quick counting?

So Hollerith constructed a machine for counting people and their basic attributes. A insulated card would be placed over a series of mercury pools corresponding to all the possible punch holes. Then a series of spring loaded wires (placed similarly) would be brought down over the card. Add some electricity, and bam!, holes = electrical circuits which power a specific counter to advance.

So began Hollerith's corporate counting endeavors, which formed into Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation (CTR), and which, in 1924 became IBM (International Business Machine Corporation).

What does Hollerith's counting machine have to do with computer languages? Well, as we'll see in the next article, Hollerith built a machine that counted according to a very very basic assembly language, one that "spoke in" the exact literal language of the machine's processes themselves.