For anyone interested in computing pre-history, early twentieth century punched-card processing, before von Neumann, was all about taking (monoidal) data structures (encoded as a deck of cards) with historical values and either querying them or running updates (encoded as a second deck of cards) to produce freshly copied current values.
For anyone interested in computing pre-history, early twentieth century punched-card processing, before von Neumann, was all about taking (monoidal) data structures (encoded as a deck of cards) with historical values and either querying them or running updates (encoded as a second deck of cards) to produce freshly copied current values.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_record_equipment