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Microchips have to be programmed to function. But if programmers (computers) are needed to program it, and they use microchips, how was the first one made?

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    \$\begingroup\$ Might be a duplicate of electronics.stackexchange.com/q/8685/8159. \$\endgroup\$
    – Renan
    May 13, 2013 at 3:38
  • \$\begingroup\$ Not all microchips need to be programmed to function. A microchip might contain just a single transistor. \$\endgroup\$
    – The Photon
    May 13, 2013 at 3:46
  • \$\begingroup\$ Why have nobody brought up punch cards yet? \$\endgroup\$ May 13, 2013 at 4:47

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The first microchips were designed to fetch their code from an external memory chip, whether that be RAM, ROM, EPROM, core memory or a few other exotic technologies. The computers used in the day were made out of 100's of not 1000's of simple logic chips such as gates, latches, multiplexers, registers, buffers, counters and bus driver chips. These computers were leveraged with cross assemblers and compilers that could used to produce the target machine code for the first microchip computers. As microchips became more powerful a natural progression of bootstrap type activities allowed systems built around these computer chips to host much of their own development software - and of course support for the tools of the next following microchip technology. A process that continues on even today as technology keeps marching forward.

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When the first microchips were made computers (not made of microchips) were already available.

When the first computers were built and programmed the were programmed the hard way, by hand, using paper and switches (or even wires).

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It's a bit like the question about the chicken and the egg. Obviously, the first chicken hatched from an egg that was laid by something that was not a chicken, so the egg came first.

Similarly, the first programmable microchip was programmed by chips that were not themselves programmable — but those chips had been assembled into a larger system that was programmable.

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