In 1724 Basile Bouchon invented a punched paper tape for playing organ music and this was then developed further by Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1801 for the Jacquard loom. Charles Babbage then took the idea further. Although the paper tape and the loom uses did not involve any computing as such it was the forerunner for the punched card input and the developments of Ada Lovelace and is seen as a bedrock element in computer programming. Have a look at the history of computer languages website its interesting - http://hopl.murdoch.edu.au/, hope this help to answer the question.
billytheburninginferno
2007-03-29 05:36:17 UTC
Ada Lovelace and Babbage and its nephew were writing programs for the project of "difference engine", and then the "analytical engine".
In 1945, the german K. Zuse, inventor of the Z3 computer would have defined an evolved language for this engine (with arrays and records). Few documents of the epoch about this language exist.