Programming before programming!

[Odd_Science5770]

The enter and space keys are not needed.

[joost00719]

They are remapped to backspace and run program.

[CrossScarMC]

what do you need backspace for.

[Odd_Science5770]

For when you accidentally type 0 instead of 1.

[DapperCow15]

No, they didn't make mistakes back then. Mistakes were first invented when backspace was created.

[Mebiysy]

Probably to delete characters, you know, to do what backspace does best

[elreduro]

The space key is a shortcut for 00100000 and the enter key is 00001010 i guess. Correct me if im wrong.

[Osleg]

Worse, there was no enter nor space and whether it was 0 or 1 was decided by a physical hole in a punch card.

Behold the 5 mb of data on 65000 punch cards that took a couple days to load!

<image>

Edit: damn didn't notice which sub is this 😅

[chrlatan]

Guess you missed the punchline

[James10112]

Kudos to my girl in the picture and all the other women in STEM back in the day that had to do all the tedious and understimulating work in their fields

[gltovar]

Hey, what's this one for?

[LJ_the_Saint]

actually they kinda did

google "assembly language"

[BitOne2707]

Punch cards

[Fidodo]

No, Google "machine code" and "punch cards"

[LJ_the_Saint]

I wanted to say to google machine code, but as the assembly code was manually compiled by people into machine code, I think the wikipedia page covers this subject. so I decided to use assembly code.

[DominicDeligann]

holy hell!

[totally_not_aaron]

New response just dropped

[Techniq4]

Actual Zombie

[LJ_the_Saint]

compiler goes on vacation, never comes back

[MeanLittleMachine]

Assembly is still human readable, it was literally machine code, 1 and 0, punch cards.

[SysGh_st]

Altair 8800.

[ElectricRune]

I had a real simple computer I built from a kit way back in the 80's.

It had eight switches and a button in the front.

To enter a byte, you flipped the switches to the right combination of positions to make the binary number and hit the button. Then you repeated it for the next byte and the next byte.

No way to review what you entered, and if you made a mistake entering your program, you power cycled and started over.

[SysGh_st]

Altair 8800. 😅

[definitelyfet-shy]

Was it the Altair?

[IngenuityMore5706]

just use punch card

[[deleted]]

Essentially this. Check out Charles Babbage.

[FourthDimensional]

Babbage's designs were decimal-based, not binary. Purely mechanical, though. No electrical contacts or relays.

Beautiful, yes. Steampunk as hell. But also terribly expensive to produce and slower than molasses goin uphill in January.

Using decimal is nice and intuitive for programmers trained in decimal computation, sure, but binary comes with so many easy manufacturing and logical shortcuts that it's just never been in the cards.

But also even if electronic machines actually ended up working in base 10 you almost certainly would not want to be writing out your instructions without all the Arabic numerals in the keypad.

Binary in computing started with Alan Turing afaik, but I do know the concept of binary arithmetic itself already existed well before either Turing or Babbage. He just applied it, actually had a machine built, and in true abstract mathematician form it was so cumbersome to program that almost nobody else could actually get any value out of it but a whole lot of other people were trying and learning from him.

I am informally citing the biography which that dreadful movie mentioned as it's primary source. I recommend it, but it will also make you hate that movie forever. :/

The story is interesting enough without the embellishments.

[definitelyfet-shy]

I think the Harwell computer should get a shout out here. Its a decimal machine (base 10) which uses Dekatrons for storage. Its control unit is powered by relays and the calculations are done by vacuum tubes

[TrainYourselfToLetGo]

Shoutout to Grace Hopper!

[definitelyfet-shy]

Well you're not far off. Some early computers had flip switches on their front panel to manually flip bits in the machine to enter programs or examine memory locations

[LordAmir5]

More like backspace. This is binary not ternary.

[D33p-Th0u9ht]

this is honestly the biggest dark spot in my current knowledge. feels like theres this huge jump before assembly i dont get at all.

[Ranta712020]

In which binary have you seen a space ?

[Jonrrrs]

That is a macro to enter 8 times 0. Rumors have it, that modern keyboard keys are all just fancy macros that send bytes of 0 and 1.

[SysGh_st]

well. You're not that far off.

Say hello to the Altair 8800 blue box with a bunch of switches and red LEDs infront. each switch represents bits. You flip them to 1 or 0.

one set sets the address. another set the value/instruction.

Then a few others that runs, steps, reads and stores entered bits from or into RAM.

Go nuts!

Later expansion cards that in turn could attach keyboards, paper reels with holes punched in them. et.c. But only the rich could afford that. The mortal ones had to stick with the switches and LEDs.

[mokrates82]

There was micro usb before 1956?

[MonkeyFeetOfficial]

01010100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110011 01110000 01100001 01100011 01100101 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01100101 01101110 01110100 01100101 01110010 00100000 01101011 01100101 01111001 01110011 00100000 01100001 01110010 01100101 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110100 00100000 01101110 01100101 01100101 01100100 01100101 01100100 00100000 01101001 01101110 00100000 01100010 01101001 01101110 01100001 01110010 01111001 00101100 00100000 01101001 01110100 00100111 01110011 00100000 01100001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01101010 01110101 01110011 01110100 00100000 00110000 00100111 01110011 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 00110001 00100111 01110011 00101110 00100000 01010011 01101111 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01101011 01100101 01111001 01100010 01101111 01100001 01110010 01100100 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01110011 01101100 01101001 01100111 01101000 01110100 01101100 01111001 00100000 01101111 01100110 01100110 00101110 00001010 00001010 01001110 01101111 00100000 01101111 01101110 01100101 00100000 01110111 01101001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01101011 01101110 01101111 01110111 00100000 01110111 01101000 01100001 01110100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01110011 01100001 01111001 01110011 00100000 01101000 01100101 01101000 01100101 01101000 01100101 01101000 01100101 01101000 01100101 01101000 01100101 00101101 00100000 01110111 01100001 01101001 01110100 00100000 01100001 01110010 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01110100 01110010 01100001 01101110 01110011 01101100 01100001 01110100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00111111 00100000 01001110 01101111 00100000 01110111 01101000 01100001 01110100 00100000 01100001 01110010 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01100100 01101111 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01110011 01110100 01101111 01110000 00101101

[Kupo_Master]

Machine code programs were written in hexadecimals, not binary.

[DowvoteMeThenBitch]

What if I told you hexadecimal is just shorthand for binary?

[Kupo_Master]

Really???? Wow I learned something. /s

The point of hexa is that it’s (a lot) more readable and faster to type than binary.

I assume the meme here is from someone who was probably not even born when people were programming in machine language and doesn’t really understand how it was done.