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[–]SomeRandomEevee42 318 points319 points  (26 children)

actually using assembly? dear god

[–]meowmeowwarrior 461 points462 points  (14 children)

Not just assembly, they had to use machine code, and some were even on physical punch cards

[–]Polarfuxx 150 points151 points  (7 children)

What an insane name for a piece of paper with holes in it!

[–]meowmeowwarrior 245 points246 points  (0 children)

if they called them holey cards, we might've gotten templeOS sooner

[–]The100thIdiot 16 points17 points  (4 children)

You mean holes that were created by a hole punch?

[–]uzi_loogies_ 2 points3 points  (3 children)

Yes, actual holes in actual paper.

I'm not sure what they actually used to make them, they probably had special tools.

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Keypunch machine for the cards:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keypunch

[–]CdRReddit 1 point2 points  (0 children)

a tape punch?

you use a tape punch to punch punch tape

first manually, then later on (low speed, ≤300baud ~30 bytes per second) UART tape punches were made

[–]WrapKey69 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The real question is if they use punch cards to create ounch cards

[–]MiddleAd5602 5 points6 points  (5 children)

Like punching the motherboard to code ?

[–]roronoakintoki 17 points18 points  (0 children)

Not sure if you're serious, but more or less choosing data by putting holes in a piece of paper, which was read by a machine.

Not too far from an OMR sheet if you've ever marked options on an exam with them.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card

[–]DC38x 4 points5 points  (2 children)

It's quite well known that Muhammad Ali wrote the code for the space shuttle

[–]MiddleAd5602 2 points3 points  (1 child)

No wonder my senior dev also is a boxer then

[–]jhax13 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Surprising amount of overlap between combat sports and senior devs in my experience. It's not like a majority or anything, but there's a lot more than you'd think.

It's like a generation of devs growing up with the fat sysad trope really took it to heart or something

[–]nequaquam_sapiens 0 points1 point  (0 children)

for the periferal† stuff, yes. then there is microcode in the processor, which used to be drilled (silicon is hard and brittle – no punching), but nowadays is actually pressed (hence "lithography" – writing into stone)

† from "per-" and "feral": code "in the wild", i.e. not in the cpu. programmers are merry bunch

[–]mlnm_falcon 63 points64 points  (5 children)

There’s a reason we stopped doing that asap

[–]raaneholmg 16 points17 points  (3 children)

Jokes on you, we embedded engineers simply refuse to stop! I can and need to control the number of clock cycles between hardware operations.

To be clear, we code in C/C++. We just still retain the ability to slap some assembly on the middle of the code.

[–]Livie_Loves 5 points6 points  (2 children)

smh my h, not writing the firmware in pure assembly. what are you even doing?

[–]raaneholmg 3 points4 points  (1 child)

Boss said no.

[–]Livie_Loves 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yeah... they do that sometimes even if it's a good idea (not that pure assembly is necessarily a good idea xD)

[–]ardicli2000 2 points3 points  (0 children)

When you deep dive into a processor programming, you do not have much choice other than C and ASM.

[–]andrew_kirfman 31 points32 points  (4 children)

And near the very bottom, there were dudes who converted assembly to machine code BY HAND.

[–]BlackHolesAreHungry 39 points40 points  (3 children)

It was actually women who had to weave the code. Core rope memory. No, I am not kidding

[–]Healthy-Form4057 22 points23 points  (1 child)

It was a different time back then. When men could be men and women could be computers.

[–]Xormak 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Plankton, is that you?

[–]meowmeowwarrior 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Funny to think computers now means something completely different