The chicken, or the egg......
 

....so which came first, the first text editor, or the first text editor's source code? ;)

the first editors would have been written in assembly, so wouldn't have required an editor to create.

it's like what came first? the compiler or the platform?? (the platform requires a compiler, but the compiler requires a platform) and asm/assembly had to of had some "intelligence" to be able to control hardware, which software gives it. This is quite a hard question.

Or like how did they make programming languages if they had no way to input stuff?

How do you compile the first compiler?

byte code. sorry... :)

punch cards didn't need vi to get functional programs running.

A computer is a method of transforming input to output. If there's no way to input stuff, there's no reason to have a computer. The only use I can think of for a machine which has no input at all is to generate (mostly) random numbers.

Taylor, I meant like no editor, no punch card interpreter, etc.

Oh, well from my operating systems class, it went something like this:

switches -> paper tape -> punch cards -> dumb terminals -> glass terminals

But back in ye olde days of switches and paper tape, you weren't really writing in programming languages, but just writing out the opcodes for the computer to do what you wanted. And everything below that level was in hardware using electrical circuits and what-not and couldn't be changed. So the implementation for each opcode was fixed. That's the way it still is, only with about a million extra layers of abstraction between the high-level programmer and the hard-coded procedures. At least, that's my recollection.

by burning a ROM with the compiler on, written in machine code