COMPUTER PROGRAMMING

Computers are electronic machines, automated processing of information, able to manipulate data in binary form and process information according to predefined sequences of instructions: the programs.

If the computer appears as a relatively recent invention, its development has required many millennia of evolution and successive discoveries.

20,000 years ago, the Cro-Magnons developed the concept of number.
Around 3,000 years before Jesus Christ, man invented writing, but not until 500 BC that the Babylonians discovered the zero, a fundamental concept for encoding binary information.

The computer as a calculating machine, is the heir of the first mechanical calculators appeared during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Generally attributed to Blaise Pascal’s invention of an early mechanical computers: the Pascaline.
This machine, the first of which was built around 1642, was limited to the operations of addition and subtraction and used gears and wheels to watch teeth.

In 1673, Gottfried Leibniz perfected the concept and develops a machine capable of performing multiplication, division and even square roots.
Leibniz also invented the binary system, which is now used by computers.

In 1834, the English mathematician Charles Babbage invented the Difference Engine, which can evaluate functions. He built his calculating machine by exploiting the principle of the Jacquard loom (a loom programmed using punch cards). This invention marks the start of programming.

In 1889, Hollerith developed his famous machine statistics: with electricity, this machine can rapidly decode the contents of punched cards. This machine was used for the population census of the United States in 1890.