I wonder if anyone knows when exactly our modern notions of computation first arose and were named. After all, Babbage and, before him, Leibniz, had built machines capable of executing computations long before Hermann. And, we should not forget manufacturing industry.

In 1984, I saw in operation in a factory in Harare, Zimbabwe, a machine used to make wooden floor-brushes which used a ribbon with holes in it to guide the movements and placement of a drill which made holes in the wooden base for the brush bristles. By changing the ribbon, different patterns of bristle holes could be produced for different shaped brushes, all on the same machine. This machine had been made in Sheffield, England, in 1870. I believe there were similar machines in operation much earlier than this in the textile industry.

No doubt the engineers of Sheffield who designed this machine did not call the ribbon a program, nor perhaps even distinguish between what we would call “hardware” and “software”. But the concepts were clearly present, even if named differently or even not named.