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Have you or have you seen someone program in machine language? I'm not talking assembly, I'm talking the real deal, the lowest level you can go. Do you just punch in 1s and 0s or the hex equivalent in a manner the machine will recognize? How would the machine recognize it in the first place? Is it possible to machine code through programs or do you physically need to fiddle with the CPU itself, or do it through some method that is radically different from higher languages?

The computer was designed to be able to read those ones and zeros (often via punch-card input). You were still programming, just without the benefit of many high-level constructs that today we take for granted. You also had to do your own low-level memory management (no, malloc and free do not count)

Other computers had you flip switches and then press a button for every line of machine code (IIRC, the Altair did that).

Normally every binary can be translated to at least some form of assembler,
simply because every binary encodes rules and rules can be decrypted.

The worst thing i ever did was writting a programm that "infects" *.exe files and alters the entry point. For testing i added some seperatly written code to my test exe.

100$ question
Does somebody know what this is and what is it for (intel asm)?

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