Where does Hello World come from?

Question

Where does the concept of the first program programmers learn to do is print hello world to the console originate from?

This seems to be a tech tradition as old as the mountains? Where does the tradition come from?

There's an article on Wikipedia about that, is it of any help? — Justme, May 12 '22 at 18:02
I think the first program to display "HELLO WORLD" substantially predates the invention of C, or even the notion of hooking a computer up to a teletype. I don't remember the year, but a machine which was hooked up to an oscilloscope displayed the words "HELLO WORLD", on two separate lines, as a crude bitmap that was perhaps 32 pixels wide by 16 pixels high. — supercat, May 12 '22 at 18:12
https://www.thesoftwareguild.com/blog/the-history-of-hello-world/#:~:text=Though%20the%20origins%20of%20Hello,used%20to%20illustrate%20external%20variables. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/602237/where-does-hello-world-come-from — UncleBod, May 12 '22 at 18:27
The earliest ‘Hello world’ program I know of was Kernighan’s, written in B, which I mention in my answer about character literal syntax. There may have been some earlier occurrences of the phrase, though. — user3840170, May 12 '22 at 20:16
@user3840170: I saw many years ago, I think at the Boston Computer Museum, a black and white film clip of a demonstration of a couple of programs on a computer that had an oscilloscope hooked up to A/D converters to allow horizontal and vertical control of the beam. One program traced out a computed projectile path, but the other showed some text--I'm pretty sure it was "HELLO WORLD"--as a pattern of dots. No idea how to find that clip, though. — supercat, May 12 '22 at 22:55
Re, "the first program programmers learn to do" That's somewhat misunderstanding the point of Hello World. I've been employed as a software developer for more than forty years, and I still "do" Hello World all the time. The point of Hello World is to prove that some new thing works at some basic level. (e.g., You can use it to prove to yourself that you have learned how to use a new toolchain to turn source code into something executable.) — Solomon Slow, May 13 '22 at 13:12
@SolomonSlow: A "hello world" test can actually be useful even as part of testing other programs. If inserts return printf("Correct horse battery staple"); into the start of main(), and running the program does something other than output "Correct horse battery staple", that can really help prevent a lot of wild-goose chases when trying to track down bugs. — supercat, May 13 '22 at 17:34

Where does Hello World come from?

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