Diff — Main Page

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.

## Featured article

[[File:eniac-operators.jpg|right|300px|Two of the ENIAC six at the machine's panels — read their story in [[The first programmers]]]]

**[[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."

## Explore the trails

Follow the links — every article connects to the next.

### The dawn of programming

[[Jacquard Loom]] → [[Joseph-Marie Jacquard]] → [[Punched card]] → [[Charles Babbage]] → [[Analytical Engine]] → [[Ada Lovelace]] → [[Bernoulli numbers]] → [[Herman Hollerith]] → [[IBM]]

A loom's card chain becomes a census tabulator becomes the company that carried cards into the computer age.

### The codebreaking war

[[Sir Hugh Sinclair]] → [[Bletchley Park]] → [[Alan Turing]] → [[Colossus]]

The admiral who bought a country estate with his own money; the mathematicians who filled it; the secret computer that helped win a war.

### The first programmers

[[The first programmers]] — [[Kay McNulty]] · [[Betty Jennings]] · [[Betty Snyder]] · [[Marlyn Wescoff]] · [[Fran Bilas]] · [[Ruth Lichterman]] — then [[EDVAC report]] → [[John von Neumann]] → [[Manchester Baby]] → [[EDSAC]]

Six women who programmed ENIAC by rewiring it, and the stored-program machines that followed.

### The age of languages

[[COBOL]] → [[Grace Hopper]] → [[FORTRAN]] → [[LISP]] → [[ALGOL]]

The committee language that won't die, the admiral who built the first compiler, and the three 1950s languages that set every convention since.

## Did you know?

- 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.

## AdaLogic BASIC

- [[AdaLogic BASIC]] — the language itself: what it is and what it's for

- [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

## Inside the wiki

- [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

- Be helpful and **family-friendly**.

- Write what you know; fix what you can.

- Summaries help everyone — leave one when you edit.