Abstractions are only relevant when they are leaky. People alive today were flipping toggle switches to load individual machine codes into memory. Some of them literally knew what every single transistor in the machine was designed to do.
Programmers at the time went from thinking these kit computers are toys to watching all the old ideas like virtual memory, cache, pipelining, networking, and multiple cores get reintroduced as the anemic transistor budget exploded. None of it was particularly novel, but the slow introduction of older ideas was a great way to learn all this stuff from the ground up.
Programmers at the time went from thinking these kit computers are toys to watching all the old ideas like virtual memory, cache, pipelining, networking, and multiple cores get reintroduced as the anemic transistor budget exploded. None of it was particularly novel, but the slow introduction of older ideas was a great way to learn all this stuff from the ground up.