A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages. 1801 - Joseph Marie Jacquard uses punch cards to instruct a loom to weave "hello, world" into a tapestry.
Redditers of the time are not impressed due to the lack of tail call recursion, concurrency, or proper capitalization. 1842 - Ada Lovelace writes the first program. She is hampered in her efforts by the minor inconvenience that she doesn't have any actual computers to run her code. Enterprise architects will later relearn her techniques in order to program in UML. The Daily WTF. Xkcd.