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
No real breakthrough was needed, keyboards that generate an electrical signal that a computer could interpret predate the computer. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleprinter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleprinter) was used since 1887 in telegraphy. You could connect a keyboard on one end of a long wire and a printer on the other side. They could alos print to purchase tape.
You can store machine code (language) on punchcards, it is not separate concepts. You can store code in high-level language on punch cards to that need to be compiled to run.
There is a keyboard to enter information onto punchcards too. The common IBM 80-column punchcard standard was introduced in 1928 and used with computers on a large scale into the 1970s.
Early computers that had a keyboard and text output interface simply used existing teleprinter technology.
Puchard is primarily a storage medium, it was replaced by magnetic tape and floppy discs, not keyboards.
To remove the need for any storage media like a punch card to run programs from memory, the first computer that do that is the Manchester Baby from 1948. It would have been quite clear even earlier that it was an option, but memory was very expensive so running stuff directly from physical media made sense early on.
The early computer was extremely expensive to purchase and run. Connecting them to a keyboard and printer/monitor was simply a waste of resources. It was better to use the electromechanical device to input the data and then run the program with that data on a computer. That way as soon as the program has been completed you can run another. It is when computers get cheap and you can have a computer that multiple users can use at the same time it makes sense to have a keyboard and monitors as a way to input data like we do today. You could have done that before but it did not make financial sense
Look at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-Automatic_Ground_Environment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-Automatic_Ground_Environment) that is a US air defense computer system from the late 1950s. It use a light pen and consoles with lots of buttons, not exactly a traditional keyboard but the principle is the same. It runs a program that the user interacts with so you need input for real-time information to the computer, this means punchcards are not an option. The program might have been stored on a punch card and read into memory, I have no idea how that part works.
The first drive was made in 1956, it was very expensive back then. So what storage media was used was often a question of money. Compare it to mechanical hard drives today that are still used even if SSDs exist because they can store data cheaply.
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