I can tell I’m dumb because of how much effort I’ve put into trying to understand this and I still haven’t gotten it. But for the life of me I can’t grasp how we got from punch cards to machine language to assembler language. It is almost magic.
In: Technology
You can store any data on punch cards — machine code, assembly language, compiled languages like FORTRAN, novels, recipes, poetry. (Source: still have some of mine somewhere.)
Data is data.
What changed was the economies of scale. The more people bought computers, the more R&D went into them, the cheaper and more useful it got to make them easier to use. A room full of card punch machines is pretty cheap to set up. A room full of teletypes that can talk directly to the mainframe is more expensive, and it takes more sophisticated software and infrastructure to let multiple people use the same computer rather than feeding in one person’s card deck at a time.
All the advances we take for granted: online connections, glass CRTs, mice, networks, the Web, were incremental improvements on what came before, and were made because the previous interation was useful and there was proof that it was worth improving.
Could we have built a smartphone in 1969? No. Were computers useful enough in 1969 to keep improving? Yes.
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