At least with the Difference Engine, they had a working model. Babbage never got round to modelling or even properly designing the Analytical Engine; it was just a lot of ideas on paper. But it would have been programmable like a modern computer, which the DE was not. Byron's daughter, Ada Lovelace, was going to do the programming for him using punched cards from a Jacquard loom. She once wrote that with suitable programming, a machine could be made to do anything, even write music.

I believe someone wrote an SF novel in which the Analytical Engine got built (with a bit of help from Ada's father!) and the eventual result was a nineteenth century version of the modern information age, all steam-powered.

It was Q-Basic, be exact. I played a lot with it.

My first employer was migrating from IBM 447 (advanced version of 407) to a "proper computer" (IBM 1401H) when I joined. I still remember we had a panel for payroll and a few other repeat complex tasks tho' I didn't get to program it myself.

Thanks for the link. Some of the jargon (minor/inter/major, counter, accumulator ..) used by my seniors makes sense now. Great read (read it fully including the comments). Other jargon used (unitRecordMachine, CE).. THREE LOVELY COMMENTS.

I also downloaded another manual from IBM.

The links are here.
http://www.righto.com/2017/04/1950s-...plugboard.html (Reproduced from the original post #381).

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/pun...ples_Feb66.pdf

AP

So in 2005 (I was 15 at the time) I've decided I wanna work in IT - I loved computers since I got my first one like 5 years ago. First choice was software developer. So, went with the most popular at the time solution - web development with PHP. And god friggin dammit, PHP was so unbelievably utter shit, I went "nope" really quick and decided to be a sysadmin (with linux, as that was what I've been using at the time - ArchLinux). Got into uni, still set on sysadmin education and job.

And in uni in 2010 got a book from library about C# and WinForms as I've heard how C# is good from fellow schoolmates. Got back to dorm, installed Visual Studio in a VM and started going through the book. And god damn, I've spent entire night going through the book - C# was so friggin fun, and I built "actual software" - GUI with dialogs, progress bars, etc, not some boring website or CLI tool. That night changed everything - deleted ArchLinux install, installed Windows 7 and I knew I will be a .NET developer. And in 2013 I started working as a junior .NET developer full time.

Problem was that Windows and especially Windows Server were crap. I missed Linux. But I loved .NET and C# (and meddling with Java, Python, Ruby - they weren't as good or fun) and Windows was the only realistic way (lol mono) to continue with .NET.

I doubt I would have lasted as a .NET developer for much longer, started having existential crisis not knowing what to do else. Windows sucked so much. But then Balmer finally pissed off and there were talks about multi platform .NET - .NET Core. So in 2016 I bought my first Macbook Pro, installed newly released .NET Core, rented a server - installed ArchLinux on it (just to remember the good old days, but seriously though, don't use ArchLinux in production) and started writing my hobby projects on Mac OS X and deploying to Linux. At work we still continued with older .NET and Windows Server (and Dell laptops with Windows and Visual Studio), but I saw the writing on the wall - Windows was not the future.

And today - full fledged and, imo, better IDE than Visual Studio is multiplatform - Rider from Jetbrains. I still write my hobby stuff on macOS and deploy to newer ArchLinux hobby server. But at work we're using .NET Core 3.1 or .NET 5 - so finally writing work code on Macbook and deploying to Linux servers (RHEL or SLES, ArchLinux is not for production, really). Happy days. And of course we were Windows shop with Windows Servers, so my experience while transitioning to new age came in handy - people didn't know what was ssh, linux, nginx, etc. And now no one wants to work with Windows Server and still shudder remembering IIS.

So first programming language was PHP, but first real (and current) programming language was and still is C#.

Bruce Sterling The Difference Engine That kicked off the whole "steampunk" thing which I get, but don't share in.

When I learned Unity3D engine, I was learning C# for it. But the first independent language was C++. I started to learn it in August 2017.

I learned Visual Basic in high school but I haven't really had any use for it since then. My second language was Java. That's the language I'm most comfortable in.

I wonder how many contemporary C++ programmers have learned it as a "have to" rather than a "choose to", for that same reason. That it has become the default language in academics, and also in professional life.

I took my first an only programming course in C++ at university, back in 2004 or so. I was not majoring in anything computer related, and took programming instead of something else for an easy "A". I have never "included" <iostream> since then, probably to my detriment.

A machine language for the Cyclone Big Eight computer in the Electrical Engineering Building at Iowa State University, about 1962. Next was Fortran about a year later on an IBM.

Fortran on an IBM 1130 coded via IBM 29 punch-card machines.

C++ was the first one (followed by Java, then VB, then C#). Have not touched any code in a decade now. Long story.