ESL: history of the "RUN" word

[Drizzt]

We are having a discussion over an Italian NG about the "Run" word.

Simply said...can somebody direct me to a link where to found info about the "birthday" of Run in the sense of executing something? Like running a task, for example?




(just to tell: we are discussing about the use of Run for launching computer programs. I think that "run", being a word with a lot of meaning -even one for "execute"- has been choosen naturally.
All the rest of the people think that it's been choosen because litterally "it resemble the Program Counter going forward trough memory (when it's not moving backward), and after programmers used it in such meaning, it become widely used the same way by the rest of the world".)

[Fluff]

I always thought is was based on that concept that programs used to be on paper tape a long time ago and the paper tape ran through the machine to 'run' the prgram.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer

[Gurm]

Like fluff, I always thought that it had to do with 'running' the paper tape through the reader.

[Jessterw]

Have to third that assumption.

It's definitely not the technical term for what it's describing, but to expand on what Gurm said, it likely had roots in someone saying something like, "... while I finish running this program through the computer..."

Which, at the time, would have been a natural choice of words given the use of "running [something] through" was already an established phrase for passing or feeding one object through another.