What was the First Assembler program like ?

First you have to know that transistors don’t understand anything other than 0s and 1s.

And there are lot of things that can be done with the combination of transistors. You give input to the combination unit of transistors (let’s call it a circuit) and it will produce a desired outcome.

(Remember all the fun projects from the magazines like Popular Electronics and Radio Shack). They were nothing but a circuit, combination of transistors.

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So, the manual input in 0s and 1s is to be given to transistors to produce output in 0s and 1s. Basically, input 1 is the application of a low voltage on the one of the transistor circuit input terminals. And input 0 is absence of that low voltage.

ASCII has already prescribed what a combination of 0s and 1s usually stand for. Entire alphabet and other characters have a corresponding Binary code. And basis that the hexadecimal Op codes are also prescribed like F8 88 80 as input for any given circuit.

Now, when people got tired of manually applying voltage to so many inputs (via punch cards, toggle switch etc), they decided to build another transistor circuit which did nothing but translation. When your keyboard types the word MOV the circuit should produce 88 in binary, When the keyboard types the word ADD, the circuit should produce 80 and so on.