The Institute for Advanced Study machine paired a widely copied stored-program architecture with published coding methods, spreading both a hardware model and a style of numerical instruction programming.
The Harvard Mark I turned programming into organized preparation: translating mathematical procedures into tape instructions, checking them, reusing subroutines, and documenting a machine for teams of operators.
Colossus showed that an electronic machine could be repeatedly reconfigured for different logical tests, making wartime codebreaking a formative case of program-like control before stored programs.
ENIAC’s 1948 conversion replaced much of its plugboard-style setup with coded instructions selected from function-table switches, dramatically changing how the machine was programmed while exposing competing meanings of “stored program.”
The 1968 NATO conference at Garmisch helped establish 'software engineering' as a deliberate response to growing problems of complexity, reliability, cost, scheduling and maintenance.
Ada Lovelace's 1843 notes on the Analytical Engine did more than describe a calculation. They explored how a programmable machine might manipulate symbols according to rules and helped make the concept of software imaginable.
Long before electronic computers, punched cards let a textile machine reproduce complex patterns from stored instructions. The Jacquard loom made control portable, repeatable and separable from the mechanism that executed it.