People underestimate how many women were involved in the early days of electronic computing. It really wasn't until the 1970s that computing became skewed toward men and boys. Kathleen Booth, computer pioneer who made a major breakthrough in programming – obituary
Originally computer programs were written in machine code – sequences of binary ones and zeros – and reprogramming was a laborious process involving much rewiring and changes of switches. Assembly languages made the whole process much easier, the instructions in the language being converted into machine code by a program called an assembler.
Assembly languages revolutionised computer programming, and although they are described as “low-level” (most programming languages these days are “high-level”), they still have important applications in computing, including enabling programmers to manipulate hardware directly.
Click thru, you might learn something. (It will only hurt for a minute.)
Hat tip goes to Pixy Misa at Ambient Irony: Daily News Stuff 30 October 2022. And basically wins quote of the day.
The inventor of assembly language has passed away at the age of 1100100. (The Telegraph / MSN)
Kathleen Booth was an early computer scientist - her degree was in applied mathematics because there were no computer science degrees in 1947 - and worked as the programmer for a British team building some of the very first von Neumann architecture systems. Which is, basically, every computer in the world today.
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