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From Manchester Baby to Software in the AI Era
On June 21, 1948, the Manchester Baby in the UK ran humanity's first software that was truly stored in memory and executable. This software was a piece of binary machine code designed to calculate the highest proper factor of 2 to the 18th power. After running for about 52 minutes and performing 3.5 million operations, it produced the correct answer: 131,072.
From then on, computers entered the age of software. Since binary machine code was too difficult to work with, assembly language and assemblers emerged in early 1950, using short mnemonics to replace binary code, which were then translated into machine code by an assembler. While this was a huge improvement over binary, it was still tightly bound to the CPU architecture—whenever the CPU's instruction set changed, the software had to be updated or rewritten.
It wasn't until 1957 that FORTRAN, the world's first commercial high-level language, was born. From then on, code no longer directly corresponded to hardware instructions, and software began to decouple from hardware.
When I was in university, due to my major, what I learned in school was assembly, FORTRAN, and MATLAB. At that time, since Unix was the mainstream server system for the internet, the vast majority of internet software was developed in C or in Perl, a language that evolved from C, while…
