My dad had a computer class in high school that involved filling in ordered punch cards and then they’d send them off to a university to run them on their mainframe and they’d send the output punch cards back. That wouldn’t have even been assembly, it would have been machine code, though they probably marked the punch cards to be easier to remember what bits meant what. But it would take like a week to find out there was a mistake in the code.

wow, sounds slightly faster than the servers I have to write selenium automation for.

good news, they asked me to get off the project.