Think back… think way back, possibly to before you were born. Think of
the reasons why SHARE was founded in 1955, and the main activities of
SHARE. Once upon a time, when electronic computing technology was still
being figured out, each new machine was so different from its
predecessors that it was necessary to rewrite a whole new set of
utilities and drivers and applications for it. Even Assembly language
wasn’t available until 1957 (and the first COBOL compiler didn’t come
out until 1960) so most of this stuff had to be manually entered in
machine language.
http://destinationz.org/Mainframe-Solution/Trends/elephants-and-mainframes
Um, no. ACM SIGPLAN History of Programming Languages Conference 1978
article on FORTRAN says:
Page 166 1.3 Programming Systems in 1954
Most "automatic programming" systems were either assembly programs, or
subroutine-fixing programs, or, most popularly, interpretive systems to
provide floating point and indexing operations.
---
That's far beyond machine language three years before article claims
anything more advanced than that was used.
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