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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.

AdaLogic BASIC

• AdaLogic BASIC — the language itself: what it is and what it's for
• Handbook — the official language reference on the main site
• Browser IDE — write and run ALB without installing anything
• Source on GitHub — the compiler and toolchain are Apache 2.0 open source

Featured article

History of Programming — from 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."

Latest from ALB

Original articles and announcements from the ALB Team.

• Ada vs Rust: The Memory Safety Showdown — Rust, Ada/SPARK, the NSA, the White House, and the 70% problem. Who wins the memory safety war?
• Why Debian Is Still the King — the social contract, the server dominance, the APT quirks, and why it'll still be here in 2036.
• Ubuntu in 2026 — Rust coreutils, ARM64 Livepatch, Wayland-only GNOME 50, WSL containers, and the complete picture.
• Rust 1.99 and Microsoft's All-In Bet — C-variadic functions land in stable Rust; Microsoft rewrites the Windows kernel in it.

See all articles: Special:News · Category:News

The reference shelf

Long-form encyclopedia articles — the deep reads.

• Google — 5,000 words on the company that made search a verb: PageRank, the ad engine, Android, Chrome, DeepMind, and the antitrust trials.
• UNIVAC I — the first computer sold in America: mercury memory, tape drives, and the night it called the 1952 election.
• Ada — the language the Pentagon built for systems that cannot crash.
• SPARK — the provable Ada subset: when "it works" is not enough and you need a proof.
• Rust — the borrow checker, the ownership model, and the fastest-growing systems language on Earth.
• C — half a century old and still the lingua franca every systems language is measured against.
• JoAnn H. Morgan — the only woman in the Apollo 11 firing room: from a 1958 Army missile summer job to the top floor of Kennedy Space Center.

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.

The living-room computer

Konrad Zuse → Z3 → Plankalkül

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.

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.
• 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 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.

Inside the wiki

• Special:Statistics — page and edit counts
• Special:AllPages · Special:Categories · Special:Random
• Special:RecentChanges — every edit as it happens
• Special:LonelyPages · Special:DeadendPages — pages waiting for links
• Wiki Help — the full markup guide: links, images, infoboxes, redirects

Ground rules

• Be helpful and family-friendly.
• Write what you know; fix what you can.
• Summaries help everyone — leave one when you edit.