How can you tell a normal person about first program?

How can you tell a normal person (i.e. your mom, grand mom, your little brother) how was the first program was written? They as开发者_StackOverflowk this question a lot and I really can't give an answer they can understand.

Easy, send them to Ada Lovelace's wiki page. She wrote a "program" to calculate a set of Bernoulli numbers using Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine in 1843.

During a nine-month period in 1842-43, Lovelace translated Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea's memoir on Babbage's newest proposed machine, the Analytical Engine. With the article, she appended a set of notes. The notes are longer than the memoir itself and include (Section G), in complete detail, a method for calculating a sequence of Bernoulli numbers with the Engine, which would have run correctly had the Analytical Engine ever been built. Based on this work, Lovelace is now widely credited with being the first computer programmer and her method is recognised as the world's first computer program.

It depends on how you define things. The first computers were programmed largely by rearranging patch-cords. Only (a little) later was memory added to produce stored-memory computers. The first programs for these were written by turning switches on or off to set 0's or 1's for a word, then (when they were all set to the right values) toggling another switch to "push" that word into memory, and setting the "current location" counter to the next memory address.

The same basic idea continued to be used for the initial boot program for quite a while after computers had memory -- e.g., once upon a time I wrote code for a Control Data mainframe that had a set of switches to toggle in the boot program (though in this case, they were on an auxiliary computer called a "PPU"). I also (again, long ago) booted a rather oddball variant of a DEC PDP-8 by toggling the boot code in on front-panel switches (and even though that was decades ago, the computer in question was already obsolete at the time).

Maybe you find you answer in Wikipedia: Bootstrapping. Basically its more about Compilers than on programming languages, as the very first program is written either on other machines or by hand, e.g. using Punch Cards.