3 Mar
2015
3 Mar
'15
10:11 p.m.
On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 9:40 PM, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
On 02/23/2015 09:17 PM, Ian S. King wrote:
My first (paid) programming job was in 6800 assembler, using the Motorola
support (!)
than the EXORciser, but the Powers That Be hadn't thought of
that. <sigh>
And patching was accompanied by *hand-written* notes on an "authoritative"
printed listing. Every so often we'd incorporate all the patches back into
the sources and run a new "authoritative" build. Since the EXORciser
monitor didn't spool its output, the printer's speed was the limiting
factor - so a build would take HOURS.
Those were the days?. -- Ian
--
Ian S. King, MSIS, MSCS, Ph.D. Candidate
The Information School <http://ischool.uw.edu>
Archivist, Voices From the Rwanda Tribunal <http://tribunalvoices.org>
Value Sensitive Design Research Lab <http://vsdesign.org>
University of Washington
There is an old Vulcan saying: "Only Nixon could go to China."
EXORCISER system. It took hours (as in a major
part of a day, longer than
the work day) to reassemble the entire code base, so we would patch the
program in the PROM programmer. We would, of course, back port the
changes
in symbolic assembler to the source, and every few days just take the
downtime hit to rebuild the code base. Keep in mind that this was
natively
hosted on a 6800 system.
Well, I *know* that there was a cross-assembler for 6800 code. Even a
moderately small minicomputer would outpace a 6800.
Patching is okay, as long as it doesn't become permanent. I have a memory
of 7080 COBOL production programs patched with Autocoder object. Of
course, nobody knew exactly what the patches did.
One of the very good reasons to run legacy programs on emulation.
I'm certain there are thousands of these stories.
--Chuck
Yes, a cross-assembler would have run faster and provided better OS