A Brief History of Programming

The evolution of computers

A programmable computer needs to be, well, programmed. So naturally, the history of programming goes hand in hand with the evolution of computers.

Ada Lovelace: inventor of programming

In 1833, Charles Babbage met Ada Lovelace, daughter of the poet Lord Byron. She became very impressed and interested in Babbage’s plans for his programmable machines, and their collaboration began. Among other things, she wrote some notes outlining her ideas for how the Babbage Analytical Engine could be programmed. We can call her the inventor of programming, even if we had to wait over 100 years until we had the machine that could make her ideas come true. Her status today is summarized in a History Extra article from 2017 by James Essinger, where he states the following:

“Today, Ada is quite rightly seen as an icon of feminist scientific achievement, a heroine of the mind, and one of the earliest visionaries in the early history of the computer.”

In her notes, Lovelace did a couple of remarkable things. The first was that she wrote an algorithm for how Bernoulli numbers—a sequence of rational numbers often used in number theory—could be calculated by the Analytical Engine. This algorithm is considered by many to be the first computer program. Second, she outlined the future of what these machines could do–in her vision, she saw that they could be used to draw pictures and compose music. The fact is that when we finally could build a computer, the way they were programmed was heavily influenced by her ideas.