Can some knowledgable computer professionals or people answer these questions?
The Babbage Engine was invented around 1822. (There’s a Greek “engine” that could be called the first computer, that was invented over 2,000 years ago.) The first “modern” computer (it used vacuum tubes, needed a separate cooling system and took up a whole room – and was less powerful than a hand-held calculator) was built for fire-control calculations for WWII. The first little CPU-on-a-chip computer that was widely available was the Altair, based on the Intel 8080 – around 1975, IIRC. (The SW Tech computer, based on the Motorola 6800, came out around the same time.) (All of them were designed to be computers.) Ed Roberts, owner of MITS, designed the Altair. It used Altair BASIC. The first language used on digital computers at all, however, was machine code (unless you consider the wire arrangement on plugboards to be programs, in which case the first “language” was hardware.) They caught on like molasses in northern Alaska in the winter. “Slow” would be much faster than what happened
