Symbolic machine code
In 1967 I started programming a Ferranti Argus minicomputer. It had a primitive assembler that alllowed addresses such as v12, v13, etc. So not a fully fledged assembler by the standards of the contemporary IBM 1620, another machine I used.
I later learned that EDSAC programs were written in a similar primitive assembler: clearly an ancesral work.
Neither EDSAC nor Argus had floating point hardware, so for science and engineering calculations you had to understand scaled fraction arithmetic. Not many people did.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
