Summary

In this chapter, we have gone back in history and explored the development of computers. The history of computers is a vast topic, but we touched on some important events that have made computers the fantastic machines that we know today.

For a computer to be useful, it requires programs, and to be able to write programs, we need programming languages. We learned that the development of programming was closely related to the development of computers, even if Lady Ada Lovelace managed to write what was considered to be the first computer program about 100 years before the first computer was built.

With the history of computers covered, we then turned our attention to what a computer program is and how the computer can use the instructions given in the program to accomplish the intentions of the programmer. To do that, we examined the smallest parts of data a computer can handle, the bits, which are the zeros and ones of the binary representation of numbers. We learned...