A Manual of Operation for the ASCC
More info
- Creator
- Harvard Computation Laboratory, largely Grace Hopper
- Released
- 1946
- Type
- Manual
Five hundred pages from 1946 on how to make a machine do what you intended — the world's first programming manual, written before the word existed.
Harvard Mark I was finished in 1944 and had to be explained to somebody other than the people who built it. The result was volume I of the Annals of the Computation Laboratory of Harvard University, published in 1946: over five hundred pages of machine description, circuit diagrams, code-hole tables and — the genuinely new part — worked examples of turning a problem into a control tape. Howard Aiken wrote the preface; most of the text was written by Grace Hopper and the laboratory staff.
What makes it a landmark is that it treats coding as a craft with rules of its own rather than a footnote to electrical engineering. It sets out how a calculation is broken into steps, where intermediate results live in the counters, and how a setup is checked before it is run. Two years later the First Draft would define what a computer is. This book had already defined what a programmer does.