A recent edition of [Babbage’s] The Chip Letter discusses the obscurity of assembly language. He points out, and I think correctly, that assembly language is more often read than written, yet… ...

A slightly more human readable form of machine code is called assembly language and a program called an assembler is used to convert the assembly notations into machine code.

The target program is a hard drive test, so part of it isn’t just knowing assembly but understanding how to interface with the machine. That was pretty common, too.