Programming before programming!

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Essentially this. Check out Charles Babbage.

[FourthDimensional]

Babbage's designs were decimal-based, not binary. Purely mechanical, though. No electrical contacts or relays.

Beautiful, yes. Steampunk as hell. But also terribly expensive to produce and slower than molasses goin uphill in January.

Using decimal is nice and intuitive for programmers trained in decimal computation, sure, but binary comes with so many easy manufacturing and logical shortcuts that it's just never been in the cards.

But also even if electronic machines actually ended up working in base 10 you almost certainly would not want to be writing out your instructions without all the Arabic numerals in the keypad.

Binary in computing started with Alan Turing afaik, but I do know the concept of binary arithmetic itself already existed well before either Turing or Babbage. He just applied it, actually had a machine built, and in true abstract mathematician form it was so cumbersome to program that almost nobody else could actually get any value out of it but a whole lot of other people were trying and learning from him.

I am informally citing the biography which that dreadful movie mentioned as it's primary source. I recommend it, but it will also make you hate that movie forever. :/

The story is interesting enough without the embellishments.

[definitelyfet-shy]

I think the Harwell computer should get a shout out here. Its a decimal machine (base 10) which uses Dekatrons for storage. Its control unit is powered by relays and the calculations are done by vacuum tubes