+ 3

How was the first assembly made in which fortran language the first Program were written from blank screen to assembler ?

First assembly ?

14th Mar 2018, 6:19 PM
Zafar Iqbal
Zafar Iqbal - avatar
2 Answers
+ 11
First off, there were no screens back then. Initially, code was written in binary. No Assembly, other language, or Operating System. Binary is a major pain to code in. Codes were entered with toggle switches. Eventually, you punched cards (like index cards but bigger) with binary that was read from the binary you toggled. This is another huge pain because a single mis-toggle meant starting over. That was how you loaded the Assembler code. It was a binary deck read by the toggled binary. The data cards you put in the deck with it was your Assembly program you were testing. You would punch your output binary into new cards, which you could start the process over again to run. You had full access to the entire computer, but had to write everything yourself. There wasn't libraries or anything else to help. Fortunately, magnetic media started making life easier cutting out a lot of the process as the binaries could be stored on it. You still had to toggle a simple binary to read the first block of code from the media, but libraries and operating systems became available. Scientists didn't really do good with Assembly programming as it wasn't something they cared about so Fortran was made to let them crunch numbers not write programs. When I started with computers in 1973, I had access to all of these technologies. I could toggle the bootstrap loader from memory as I did it so many times a day. The mainframe I used didn't have an operating system; just a fancy loader that decided which binary I wanted and ran it for me.
15th Mar 2018, 2:35 AM
John Wells
John Wells - avatar
+ 1
thanks I appreciate your answer :)
15th Mar 2018, 8:05 PM
Zafar Iqbal
Zafar Iqbal - avatar