Reserach Paper Appendix A - Short general programming history - Section on Babbage

Yet, an even more important development came by way of a mid-1800’s Englishman named Charles Babbage. His work on mechanical computers was “game-changing.” He wished to make the calculation of mathematical tables both quicker and more reliable. Due to personal and financial issues, his machines were never completed in his lifetime, but, for example, his “Difference Engine No. 2” was successfully built form his plans by the London Science Museum in the late 1990’s. (The printer, an advancement itself in several ways, was rebuilt by the London Science Museum in 2000.)

“Although Babbage's machines were mechanical monsters their basic architecture was astonishingly similar to a modern computer. The data and program memory were separated, operation was instruction based, [the] control unit could make conditional jumps and the machine had a separate I/O unit.” (Wikipedia, ‘Charles Babbage’) In fact, the machine and its language are considered to be Turing-complete, meeting Alan Turing’s ideal-computer standards.

Relevant to a discussion of programming in particular, in 1842 an Italian by the name of Luigi Menabrea wrote a paper on Babbage’s Analytical Engine. Ada Lovelace (full name: Augusta Ada, Countess of Lovelace) began the task of translating this into English. She made extensive notes (annotations) in the process, those notes eventually being longer than Menabrea’s actual document. The most important section of these notes was a set of instructions for the machine on how to compute a mathematical series know as the “Bernoulli numbers”. These instructions would have worked had the Analytical Engine been built, and thus, this is regarded as the first computer program, and Ada as the first programmer. Her notes also feature (one of?) the first articulations of the “Garbage In, Garbage Out” principle. Ada writes: “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths.”

Furthermore, Babbage himself once said, in relation to funding-seeking meetings with the British Parliament: “On two occasions I have been asked,--"Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”

The mid-1900s featured many hardware innovations, and many computer first-ofs, including some early computers designed for WWII military work. Also, the latter part of the century saw amazing improvements in small computer components, the processors and transistors. We have thus been brought from tally sticks to the modern computing era.