-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----Hash: SHA1On Fri, Mar 28, 2003 at 10:23:24PM -0800, Derek Gladding wrote:http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.htmlThat would be a prime example of hardware being used to do what we nowdo in software thanks to the advent of general-use computers.
It's a little more than just hardware. There's a lot of text there (Ada wrote far more detailed documentation than most programmers, certainly me, do), but have a look at the paragraph: "It contains two principal species of cards: first, Operation cards, by means of which the parts of the machine are so disposed as to execute any determinate series of operations, such as additions, subtractions, multiplications, and divisions; secondly, cards of the Variables, which indicate to the machine the columns on which the results are to be represented. The cards, when put in motion, successively arrange the various portions of the machine according to the nature of the processes that are to be effected, and the machine at the same time executes these processes by means of the various pieces of mechanism of which it is constituted. " This is certainly software, and definitely is old enough to have entered the public domain. - Derek
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