A very interesting article on Compiling.
Although you were generous with a 1Gb hard drive in “the early days” :-)
My first hard drive was 5Mb and coming from Mag Tape this was luxury.
In our computer room (the size of a modern entire office floor) we eventually had 67Mb drives that were the size of a washing machine and had to be locked down hard to the floor so they didn’t vibrate across the room when in operation.
The fundamental nature of all computing is abstraction. There are literally thousands of layers of abstraction which separates us humans from increasingly levels of complexity as we delve deeper into what makes a computer tick.
Having been a machine code and assembler programmer in my early career I can attest to the fact that it can warp your brain as I still remember the instructions for pushing and popping stacks and dealing with registers all these years later :-)
It did however help my layman’s knowledge of digital electronics at the chip level which is another whole level of abstraction.
Fortunately these days we are far far removed from these complexities and can focus on programming computers to do ever increasing sophisticated tasks without having to get down into the weeds of how it all works.