Early Stages in Programming

Early Stages in Programming

The earliest computers were not programmed in the same way as today’s computers, instead the programs were hard-wired into the machine and the physical wiring was done by hardware experts. In order to modify such a program, the programmer had to rearrange the wiring.

It was not long before John Von Neumann exposed the concept of sharing the same memory by both programs and data. In this case the programs were entered into the memory through a switch panel as a stream of bits.