Who was the first software programmer in the world?

Do you know the city of Manchester in the UK?

Yes. I also know the football clubs Manchester United (www.manutd.com), Manchester City (www.mancity.com), and even some of their famous players.

Most developers know that football is the signature of Manchester. But few are aware that the world’s first software was actually created in this very city. It was run on a computer called the Manchester Baby at exactly 11 a.m. on June 21, 1948. The first software developer in history at that time was a 27-year-old man named Tom Kilburn. Before writing this software, he was a mathematician and a computer scientist.

Back in Tom’s day, to instruct a computer to perform a task, people had to turn switches or punch holes into a card, then feed the punched cards into the machine. If there was a mistake, they had to manually redo the whole process — turn the switches again, punch new cards, and reload everything. It was hard and painstaking work.

Tom’s colleagues built the Manchester Baby computer, which had the ability to store instructions in electronic memory and execute them repeatedly. He wrote a sequence of instructions, loaded them into memory, and successfully ran them. That’s how the first software was created.

If you’re wondering, what did the first software actually do? It simply solved a mathematical problem — finding the greatest divisor of the number 262,144.
Can you write a similar piece of software using a programming language you know? Java, for example?

In the future, if you ever travel to the UK for work, be sure to visit the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester to see with your own eyes the Manchester Baby computer that Tom used to run the first software in history.
NTT DATA VDS is continuously recruiting Java backend developers, Java frontend developers, automation testers, and Android developers to work on projects for NTT DATA DACH, NTT DATA ITALIA, and in the future, NTT DATA UK.
Manchester is closer than you think.