The first computer I ever worked on was an
IBM 650 in 1958. (I don't remember the girls being that pretty, then

) The drum was something like 18 inches in diameter, and 2-2.5 feet long. Wikipedia reminds me that it had 2,000 signed 10-digit words of memory. All programming was done in Assembly language. I remember we considered it very advanced, because we didn't have to manually assign numeric addresses for variable locations.
Even then, the CPU was much faster than the drum. The drum was so slow that the Assembly language was called SOAP, Symbolic Optimizing Assembly Program, and it actually worked out where to store the data and executable instructions on the drum so that the next instruction and data would be underneath the read head "just in time" for the CPU to use them. Today, that kind of problem is solved with caches.
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