Programming: Who started?

Do you know who was the first programmer?

a) Eckert J

b) William Gibson

c) Ada lovelace

d) Mauchly J

Ans: Ada Lovelace, daughter of famous poet Lord Byron is considered asa first programmer. She wrote an algorithm to be executed on Charles Babbage’s computer.  The first computer program was related to to calculation of Bernoulli’s numbers. It is said that this program remain on paper only. Charles Babbage gave her another name “The Enchantress of Numbers”.

Random memory : The First Computer

Many years back when I studied Computer programming,  I was taught  that ENIAC (Electronic Numeric Integrator And Calculator) is the first digital computer. It was created by Eckert J P and Mauchly J. It took around 3 years. The purpose was to help in World War II against German forces. It was a huge machine.  It used about 20000 vacuum tubes,  70000 resistors, 10000 capacitors and 1500 relays.  It occupied about 1800 square feet.  It used huge amount of electricity about 200 kilo watts. It weighed about 30 tons. How much did it cost? Just about $4,87000 J It is 72 years old now. It was retired in a very young age and enjoys its retired life in Smithsonian Institution.

Later I found that ENIAC has elder siblings.  Some names to mention are:

• Z1 (it has German citizenship), and it is almost ten years elder to ENIAC.
• Colossus (British citizenship) was used for code breaking.
• ABC (Atnasoff-Berry Computer) is of American origin.

ENIAC certainly has younger sibling and is ancestor of all computers we are using today and will use in future.