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by netsharc 15 days ago
The start of the story touches on even older days: they got a tape with some binary data, and couldn't just ask AI "What's this?", they had to hunt for answers in books, in their library!

And then the amount of focused work they needed, which they probably had because they weren't doomscrolling:

> Since we had no machine with a `C' complier, we chose the same method: translation by hand into another language. In a finite time (about 3 months), we had a `C' compiler which produced PDP/11 assembler.