10 Jan
2017
10 Jan
'17
8:37 a.m.
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.
ISTR PAL-11A was also an "absolute" assembler (did not output REL
files), but there was also a PAL-11R.