The evolution of application development

Application development began as a physical job where punch cards were used to define programming for machines. In particular, the Electrical Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIC) machine was invented at the University of Pennsylvania by John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert and was operated by punch card input and outputs. ENIC was also reprogrammable by rewiring the computing machine (https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~mitra/csFall2006/cs303/lectures/history.html).

These punch cards would have holes in them to designate specific instructions, such as running a calculation on a data set. These machines were massive, taking up an entire room or warehouse, and were very difficult to operate, let alone transport. The applications were written in machine code, which made it a very time-intensive and error-prone process. Human beings were forced to write out instructions for the machines that were structured in a way that machines could understand...