Essential Guide to Computing: The Story of Information Technology, The

Chapter 8. Programming, Object-Oriented Technology, and Software Development

Programming is simply the process of telling the computer what to do. In the earliest days, when both the computers and the tasks they could perform were fairly simple, programming was relatively straightforward. It's a good thing, too, since this chore was initially accomplished by flipping switches back and forth. Once paper (card punch) and magnetic storage were available to hold a bunch of instructions at once, people were ready to move beyond the direct input of machine instructions. The evolution of groups of instructions into a language, with a particular syntax and vocabulary, is a fairly obvious development. Still, the people who did early programming language ...