A Brief History of Computer Programming

The person traditionally credited to be the first computer programmer in history is Ada Lovelace, who did work on an early mechanical general-purpose computer developed by Charles Babbage. Ada wrote notes on this early computer, referred to as an ‘analytical engine’ within which are contained the first algorithm which was written i with the intention of being processed by a machine. This fact makes Ada, who was born Augusta Ada Byron, the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron, the world’s first computer programmer.
When Ada was a young adult she became interested in mathematics, with a special interest in Babbage’s work on the analytical engine. Ada translated an article about the engine between 1842 and 1843 which was written in Italian by Luigi Manabrea. Included in the translation were Ada’s own notes which contained what many people consider the first computer program written in history. This computer program was an algorithm which was encoded in way to allow the machine to process, or read it.
Fast forward about 100 years to 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania Moore School of Electrical Engineering, where ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) the first general-purpose electronic computer was built. First used to perform calculations for the development of the hydrogen bomb, it was used to calculate artillery trajectories for firing tables for the U.S. Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory. Six women were responsible for the vast majority of the programming of ENIAC, all of whom were inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame in 1997.