How did programmers program in ancient times without Google?

In the early days when computers were first invented, there was no Internet, not to mention IDEs, rich online documentation, Google and Stack Overflow, how did programmers program at that time?

A few days ago, I happened to read an interesting article by a foreign brother explaining this issue. Here is a translation. Note that this article has been slightly changed. The following is the main text:

Regarding the topic of programmer programming in ancient times, I think I have to start from the beginning. When I started programming, the computer I used was like this:

Yes, you read that right, computers at that time had no keyboard or mouse, all you could see were some switches and lights, so how did you know which switches to turn on or off? and what do they mean? You need to refer to this book:

Students who want this book can directly reply “artifact” in the background to download the pdf version.

You may ask that there is no keyboard or mouse, so where is the program written? Obviously you need some unpretentious medium:

When you want to use code to solve a certain problem, you have to write assembly code by hand, and then manually find the location to store data and code in memory, that is, manual addressing, and your memory is only 1024 bytes, which is seen by modern programmers. It’s incredible.

This is not over yet. After writing the code, it needs to be manually converted to hexadecimal, and then input to this device to run after checking.

There were no persistent storage devices like modern disks at all during this period. Of course, in addition to paper, you need to manually enter this device every time you run the program. Note, every time, but this period passed quickly. The age of paper tape has arrived.

This thing is very noisy and unreliable, but it is much better than pure manual input every time. At that time, printers and keyboards were not useful. Then I made an IO card by myself and connected it to this little thing:

Tape can be used to load and store programs at a full 110 bits per second, which is incredible speed, but the process is still painful.

Then BASIC made it possible to write real programs, tapes started to store real programs, and you started seeing these things in college:

And a lot of this:

and many, many more of these books:

Programs that need to be stored permanently began to be placed in boxes full of punched cards. During this period, you still could not write code or debug code on the machine. Debugging code requires human debugging-running code in your brain, not in In the computer, the time from changing the code to seeing the running results is calculated in hours. The amount of information required is astonishing. In a certain computing center, there is an entire room used to store information about all aspects of the computer system, stacked from the floor to the ceiling.

I personally have more than 60 books, covering the implementation details of some programming languages, as well as textbooks on operating systems and courses.

There were no online communities today at all during this period, and the closest thing to Stack Overflow was to go out into the open space of the office and yell at everyone, “Who knows what so-and-so means?” Questions mock you.

Then this thing showed up:

And can connect to:

Even better, this stack of switches runs on:

Yes, running Unix!

Now you can save the program on the computer, you can see it on the screen when you write the code, and it can be compiled and tested on the computer in real time, it is true! hour! of! , This is simply a programmer’s paradise, no wonder I wrote so much code at that time.

After that, the “Internet”, well, it’s not the current Internet, but USENET appeared. You can shout “who knows what XX means” in newsgroups and ARPAnet mailing lists, and of course you will still be in your heart. I hope that no one will laugh at you for an obvious question, and at this time there will be some guys from MIT (MIT), or CMU (Carnegie Mellon University) and Berkeley (Berkeley) to answer your question.

After that, my story is over.

The text and pictures in this article are from Code Farmer’s Desert Island Survival