It makes you wonder...

[Zej]

doesn't it make you wonder how the first programming languages were programmed? Did they have to manually
set the 0's and 1's within the core of the computer?
how'd they do it??

[Gen-X]

Punch Cards

They used to use cards with holes marked at certain places to perform certain tasks. Binary was used for numbers and ASCII for letters etc

000000000000000011111111111111112222222222222222
0123456789ABCDEF0123456789ABCDEF0123456789ABCDEF
------------------------------------------------
X X    XXXXXXX XX    XXXXXX X    XXX
XX  X  XXXXXXXXXXX XXX    XXX     XXX   XXXXX
X X X  X X     XXXXXX Xx    XXXXXXXXX

And somehow that got turned into

Set D1,12
Set D2,4

Add D2,D1,D2

Well thats it in a nutshell

"No... this is me in a nutshell... how did I get in a nutshell "
Set D1

[Juan Carlos Rey]

AFAIK the very first computers were hardware programmed. You had to plug lots of wires and the particular combination formed the program.

[Jimlin41]

Yeah, old computers used punch cards or thousands of wires for their programming. The punch cards were basically our equivalent of CD's or floppy's. I know this because I'm trying writing a research paper on the history of computers right now. Stupid internet... so distracting...