Moments from IT history that changed the world
Moments from IT history that changed the world The development of the first programming language Everything we can see now, searching in the browser or performing some tasks on our PC can only be thankful for programming languages. They are the bridges between human beings and machines, so how did everything start? Ada Lovelace: mathematician famous for writing the first computer program Ada Lovelace, a mathematical genius whose friendship with the mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer Charles Babbage resulted in early ideas for mechanical calculators and a preliminary prototype for a general-purpose computer. Her key idea was that the machine manipulated numbers as abstract quantities so that the analytical engine “might act upon other things besides numbers”. (1) In this way Lovelace first stated of the analytical engine’s potential beyond a simple calculator. Among the numerous appendices of her paper, she included an algorithm in appendix G for findi