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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.

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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."

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
• 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

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.