18 Jan
2006
18 Jan
'06
6:57 p.m.
On 1/18/2006 at 8:00 PM Michael B. Brutman wrote:
(It's more of a problem with the floppy shuffle and
the slow access to
the fake hard drive that I'm using .. the machine is probably more than
fast enough for older versions of MASM and Turbo Pascal.)
Don't be too sure--MASM didn't get fast until after 1.0.
There were actually two IBM PC assemblers 1.0 that were sold as a bundle;
ASM, which IIRC, would run in 64K on a system with one diskette drive,
didn't have error messages (just numbers) and MASM, which was probably the
slowest assembler (per unit of processor speed) that I've ever seen.
Horribly buggy too--you'd think that an assembler would at least generate
the right code. Phase errors and the dreaded "Internal Error" were all too
common. The manual notes for "Internal Error":
"Usually caused by arithmetic check. If it occurs, notify your authorized
IBM Personal Computer dealer."
Uh huh. And my Authorized IBM Personal Computer Dealer will do what?
There were some very public rants about plunking down $99 for a miserable
piece of garbage.
Fortunately there were other alternatives, including 8086 cross assemblers
running CP/M 2.2. You used them if you were smart.
MASM 4.0 was like a breath of fresh air. Reasonably fast and not too
buggy.
Cheers,
Chuck