This month we are celebrating the birth of the modern programming paradigm as the first code was successfully executed on ENIAC, one of the earliest electronic general-purpose computer, in 1947. This machine was no laptop, heck, it wasn’t even a desktop! Measuring in at eight feet tall and eighty foot long. It didn’t come with a manual, and believe it or not there was no “Google it”.
“Help me stackoverflow, you’re my only hope!” -Princess L… er… The Modern Programmer
This machine was programmed by six women, also known as the “ENIAC Six”: Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas and Ruth Lichterman, who have not received recognition for this fact until recent times.
Programming ENIAC was a very involved process that took weeks. The debugging process included crawling through the inner workings of the machine to find bad joints, tubes, and other components. I can’t even imagine the time and energy it took to get the first program to work.
Today you could have an entire website up with eCommerce in a mater of a few short hours while sipping green tea and wearing a big comfy bathrobe.
Let this little glance into history serve to inspire us to learn something new!
Here are a few resources (mostly free) I have appreciated over the years:
- Really big thick books that are now outdated and serving as bookends for other books.
- codecademy
- code.org/learn
- freeCodeCamp
Pick any of them and just dive in! Now is the time! Today is the day!