Programming History Fun Facts

Studies suggest that children ask 73 questions every single day! Now that’s a lot of who, what, why, where, and when’s. Satisfy curious minds with these interesting facts that will baffle the kids and maybe you too!

The first computer game was created in 1961

The first computer game is the Spacewar! developed in 1962 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by Steve Russell. The player had to shoot the other spaceships while flying around a star. Spacewar originally ran on a PDP-1 computer which was the size of a large car.

The world’s first computer programmer was a woman named Ada Lovelace.

Ada Lovelace created a program for an Analytical Engine. She was the first to describe the algorithms, steps the computer would take in solving certain mathematical sequences, as Bernoulli numbers. Her algorithms are considered to be the first designed for computer implementation. Unfortunately, the Analytical Engine was never built, so the program could never be tested.

The first computer covered 1,800 square feet

ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), the first large-scale, programmable computer to run at electronic speed without being slowed by any mechanical parts was built during World War II. ENIAC was breathtaking. Weighing at 30 tons, the U-shaped construct filled a 1,800 square feet room. Its 40 cabinets, each of them nine feet tall, were packed with 17,500 vacuum tubes, 10,000 capacitors, 6,000 switches, and 1,500 relays.

Python was not named after a snake

Python is a widely-used, object-oriented, and high-level programming language with dynamic semantics, used for general-purpose programming. It was created by Guido van Rossum and first released on February 20, 1991. While we may all know Python as a giant snake, the name of the Python programming language actually comes from an old BBC comedy sketch series called Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

There are over 700 different programming languages

A programming language is an artificial language built to allow humans to give instructions to a computer. Computers can’t understand English, Turkish, or Mandarin, and even though people can technically learn binary (the base language of computers) almost none do.

There is an incredible number of computer programming languages that are used by software developers, web developers, coders, and other computer science professionals. According to Wikipedia, there are over 700 different programming languages, including esoteric programming languages.

Team HUB21 / Zeynep G.