| | Welcome to the **ALB Wiki** — a programming encyclopedia written by everyone, for everyone. Anyone can edit any page, create new pages, and file them in categories. Every edit is kept in the history forever. |
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| | ## AdaLogic BASIC |
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| | - [[AdaLogic BASIC]] — the language itself: what it is and what it's for |
| | - [Handbook](/handbook) — the official language reference on the main site |
| | - [Browser IDE](/alb-ide/) — write and run ALB without installing anything |
| | - [Source on GitHub](https://github.com/rockyoliver454/AdaLogic-BASIC-ALB-Programming-Language) — the compiler and toolchain are Apache 2.0 open source |
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| | ## Featured article |
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| | [[File:eniac-operators.jpg|right|300px|Two of the ENIAC six at the machine's panels — read their story in [[The first programmers]]]] |
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| | **[[History of Programming]]** — from [[Jacquard Loom|punched cards on looms]] in 1801 to the AI-assisted editors of today: the complete tour of how telling machines what to do became its own craft. Nine public-domain photographs, the whole link web, and the reason [[AdaLogic BASIC]] exists — "programming belongs to everyone." |
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| | ## Explore the trails |
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| | Follow the links — every article connects to the next. |
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| | ### The dawn of programming |
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| | [[Jacquard Loom]] → [[Joseph-Marie Jacquard]] → [[Punched card]] → [[Charles Babbage]] → [[Analytical Engine]] → [[Ada Lovelace]] → [[Bernoulli numbers]] → [[Herman Hollerith]] → [[IBM]] |
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| | A loom's card chain becomes a census tabulator becomes the company that carried cards into the computer age. |
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| | ### The codebreaking war |
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| | [[Sir Hugh Sinclair]] → [[Bletchley Park]] → [[Alan Turing]] → [[Colossus]] |
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| | The admiral who bought a country estate with his own money; the mathematicians who filled it; the secret computer that helped win a war. |
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| | ### The first programmers |
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| | [[The first programmers]] — [[Kay McNulty]] · [[Betty Jennings]] · [[Betty Snyder]] · [[Marlyn Wescoff]] · [[Fran Bilas]] · [[Ruth Lichterman]] — then [[EDVAC report]] → [[John von Neumann]] → [[Manchester Baby]] → [[EDSAC]] |
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| | Six women who programmed ENIAC by rewiring it, and the stored-program machines that followed. |
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| | ### The age of languages |
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| | [[COBOL]] → [[Grace Hopper]] → [[FORTRAN]] → [[LISP]] → [[ALGOL]] |
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| | The committee language that won't die, the admiral who built the first compiler, and the three 1950s languages that set every convention since. |
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| | ### The living-room computer |
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| | [[Konrad Zuse]] → [[Z3]] → [[Plankalkül]] |
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| | While governments funded computing projects, a civil engineer built the first working computer in his parents' apartment — then designed the first high-level programming language while hiding in an alpine barn. |
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| | ## Did you know? |
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| | - The first published computer program was written for a machine that **didn't exist** — [[Ada Lovelace]]'s [[Bernoulli numbers]] method for the [[Analytical Engine]], 1843. |
| | - [[Bletchley Park]] was bought by the head of MI6 **with his own money**, when the government wouldn't fund it. |
| | - "Debugging" comes from a **moth taped into a logbook** at Harvard in 1947 — see [[Grace Hopper]]. |
| | - The chief of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service still signs papers **"C" in green ink** — a convention [[Sir Hugh Sinclair]] inherited and kept. |
| | - A portrait of [[Joseph-Marie Jacquard]] was woven in silk by his own invention — about **24,000 punched cards** of program. |
| | - **Plimpton 322**, a Babylonian clay tablet from c. 1800 BCE, lists exact Pythagorean triples — a thousand years before Pythagoras. See [[History of Mathematics]]. |
| | - The letter **A** is a 4,000-year-old ox — Egyptian hieroglyph ox-head → Semitic *aleph* → Greek *alpha* → A. See [[History of Language]]. |
| | - The word *electricity* comes from the Greek for **amber** — fossilized tree sap was the first known generator. See [[History of Electricity]]. |
| | - [[Alonzo Church]]'s Princeton PhD students included [[Alan Turing|Turing]], Kleene, Rosser, Henkin, Davis, Rabin, Scott, and Smullyan — arguably the greatest advising record in the history of computing. |
| | - Months before [[Donna Strickland]] won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics, a Wikipedia draft about her was **declined for notability**. Lesson: write the article anyway. |
| + | - The USSR's first machine-translation laboratory had no founding order: it came into existence the day its first lab assistant, [[Nina Leontyeva]] — a girl born above the Arctic Circle — was hired, 1 May 1959. |
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| | ## Inside the wiki |
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| | - [Special:Statistics](/wiki/Special:Statistics) — page and edit counts |
| | - [Special:AllPages](/wiki/Special:AllPages) · [Special:Categories](/wiki/Special:Categories) · [Special:Random](/wiki/Special:Random) |
| | - [Special:RecentChanges](/wiki/Special:RecentChanges) — every edit as it happens |
| | - [Special:LonelyPages](/wiki/Special:LonelyPages) · [Special:DeadendPages](/wiki/Special:DeadendPages) — pages waiting for links |
| | - [[Wiki Help]] — the full markup guide: links, images, infoboxes, redirects |
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| | ## Ground rules |
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| | - Be helpful and **family-friendly**. |
| | - Write what you know; fix what you can. |
| | - Summaries help everyone — leave one when you edit. |
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| | [[Category:Wiki]] |
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