There’s an Russian-language memoir[1] by Kronrod (of the ITEP programming school that also includes Adelson-Velskij and Landis of AVL fame and served as the bir

There’s an Russian-language memoir[1] by Kronrod (of the ITEP programming school that also includes Adelson-Velskij and Landis of AVL fame and served as the birthplace of ABBYY some decades later) that mentions that for some time, they did things exactly that way, and that it was a small breakthrough to be able to talk about symbolic variables and draw jumps graphically once they had explained to the secretarial staff how to translate that into addresses. So, taking into account the lack of accessible reference material, you are in good company :) (The book also includes a discussion on VLIW-style microcoding, a plea for more registers, and a note how a population count instruction may be worth including despite its situational utility because of how easy it is to do in hardware compared to a software emulation. That team did one of the first chess programs, though, so it’s not surprising popcount came to minds easily.) [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58582645 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58582645