Credits: Midjourney

The Untold Story Of The (Errorless) Code Written By A Woman That Took Man To The Moon

Dr. Ashish Bamania
Level Up Coding

It’s the 1950s.

The term ‘Software Engineering’ doesn’t exist.

Computers are owned exclusively by universities and institutions.

Most of them are the size of a room.

They have to be packed in special rooms as they need cooling and yes, they also make a lot of noise!

One can’t just start programming these like today. They have to get permission to access and run code on these computers.

Once granted, one would first write code on coding sheets, which would then be transcribed to punched cards using keypunch machines.

The stack of punched cards would be fed into these giants, which would then read the holes in the cards and interpret them as programming commands.

Again, it would take hours to run these.

If an error is thrown, one will have to repeat all these steps and patiently wait (to possibly end up in another error).

Although these computers look large, they have really tiny brains.

Limited by their memory, they can process little data at a time. Therefore, one can’t afford to write inefficient code that is full of bugs.

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Written by Dr. Ashish Bamania

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