3 ms·

They still used Assembler - imagine looking at any code today without comments or variable names. Reading Assembly without source code is exactly like that.

• flohofwoe 5y ago
  It was and still is fairly common to disassemble and annoate machine code dumps (which were written in assembly) so that it becomes human readable again. For instance in the 80's, the main selling point of the "Intern" books about various home computer models on the German market was the annotated ROM assembly listing. Each memory location and jump target got a descriptive label, and each line of assembly got a comment describing what it does in the context of the surrounding code. Due to the descriptive comments, this was actually more readable than most modern code bases written in high level languages I've seen. It's also much more readable than assembly code which was produced by a compiler from a high level languages (e.g. what you see on godbolt.org), because the code was written by a human in assembly in the first place. Here's a 'modern' example for the ZX Spectrum ROM which just turned up as first result when googling: https://skoolkid.github.io/rom/ https://skoolkid.github.io/rom/