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
Many many incremental developments.
First off, a punch card is a persistent representation of assembly, which itself is a mnemonic for machine code. There isn’t much disparity there. The main difference you’re referencing has to do with input device, but really the more relevant factor was storage and memory. With a punch card, you didn’t need persistent storage for code because the cards themselves contained the program. If you want to input code using a keyboard, you need to save it somewhere and retrieve it later. Floppy disks and, for very fancy systems, hard disks were the first on the scene which could serve this job well. Floppies remained pretty dominant until the price on hard disks came down enough that they could take on more and more of the OS and applications. By this point, floppies had shrunk to a smaller size with more space and CD-ROMs were starting to become much more common.
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