10 Jan
2017
10 Jan
'17
9:21 a.m.
From: Phil Budne
I've always assumed the P in PAL was for paper
tape.
The Wikipedia artile for PDP-8 says that PAL-8 assembled from paper
tape into memory, so the A and L could have been for Assembler and
Loader.
I have a number of different versions of the "PDP-11 Paper Tape Software"
manual, and the earliest one (DEC-11-GGPB-D, March '71) turns out to be for
PAL-11A, and it says it stands for "Program Assembly Language for the
PDP-11's Absolute Assembler" (pg. 3-1).
Amusing factoid: the manual says it takes about 45 minutes to re-assemble
PAL-11A from the source tape, and punch a new binary tape (this is using the
HSRP).
ISTR PAL-11A was also an "absolute"
assembler (did not output REL
files), but there was also a PAL-11R.
Yup. PAL-11A took an input an ASCII tape with the program, and produced as
output "an absolute binary tape" (pg. 3-23).
A later version of the 'Paper Tape Software' manual (DEC-11-ASDB-D, May '71)
covers PAL11-R (although it does not, alas, decribe the relocatable output
format in detail - although I think it's documented elsewhere), and also
Link-11 and Libr-11. PAL11-R require DOS.
Noel