Some computer history
Maybe only someone like me, who wrote computer code first in binary, then in assembly, and finally in Fortran, will be interested in this little article about the history of computer code but I couldn’t resist blogging it. It brought back memories of my early days using computers. Here’s an excerpt from the article:
The term software first appeared in 1958, more than 10 years after the emergence of the first automatic, programmable digital computers. In the very early years the 1940s instructions to the adders, multipliers and logic gates of computers came from wires plugged into boards and physical switches set laboriously for each application. Or they were delivered by paper tape, the way Grace Hopper programmed the Harvard Mark I computer in 1944. With those programs, instructions resided outside the computer.
Then, in 1945, Alan Turing, John von Neumann and others had a better idea one that would fundamentally change computer architectures forever. Their idea was to store the program inside the computer and to put it in the same place as the data. This stored program architecture allowed software to be changed as easily as data, without anyone having to manipulate wires or switches or punch a new paper tape.
The earliest software was written in binary notation long strings of zeros and ones but it was hard for programmers to recognize and remember instructions made up of 16 binary digits. So higher-level notations, called assembly languages, were invented. They substituted short mnemonics for the long binary strings.
The Harvard Mark I that is mentioned was still chugging along calculating Bessel functions when I was a graduate student. It took up a lot of space along the walls of a big room that I used to frequent. The picture below from the Encyclopedia Britannica shows what it was like
Grace Hopper, also mentioned above, was a distinguished computer scientist who was involved with the Univac I as well as the Mark I and II. The Univac system was one of the very first commercial digital computers and the one given to Harvard was what I used for quantum mechanical calculations that were part of my PhD thesis research. One of the anecdotes of early computing attributes the term computer “bug” to the time that Hopper found that the source of a computer malfunction was a moth that was stuck in a relay in the Harvard Mark II. The remains of the famous moth are actually preserved in a log book from the computing group that is at the Smithsonian (shown below). It’s a good story but the term “bug” seems to have been used by engineers long before computers. Nonetheless, Hopper popularized the term in computing use.
First posted on July 16, 2007 in a shorter version
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