9 Feb
2010
9 Feb
'10
11:50 a.m.
On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 2:35 PM, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
On 9 Feb 2010 at 12:09, Ben wrote:
The first 68000 assembler I ever used was written in Whitesmiths C and
ran on VMS 3.4. It was long in use when I ran into it in 1984 - I
think it was written around 1982 or so.
We did run PALASM (written in FORTRAN) on that same VAX.
no... for a small machine Z80/6809 ect. Hmm time
to change the subject
line. How did that work back then to get software created for a new
machine? 8080's had PLM compiled on a VAX or something along the same
lines. Ben.
Cross-compilation/assembly. ?My first assemblers for the 8008 and
8080 ran on a mainframe and were coded in--wait for it--FORTRAN. Before that, well, have you ever coded in machine
code?
Yep. Did that on the 6502 before I got a line-at-a-time
assembler/monitor ROM. Also did that on the Elf - toggled in the
bits, too. By the time I was working on the aforementioned VAX, it
was no big deal for me to whip out 10-20 instruction programs in ODT
on our 11/03 and 11/04 testbeds. I also worked with a guy at UW that
could enter 1802 programs right into the EPROM programmer as sequences
of bytes in hex.
PITA for larger programs, especially branch calculations, but when you
don't have abstract development tools, it's one way to bootstrap
yourself up.
?IBM even used to have coding forms for a few machines
that were used to
facilitate that.
I've got a pad of those, I think, for an early-1960s IBM machine (IBM
1401?). They came in a computer correspondence course lesson pack.
The instructions were represented as EBCDIC characters (letters,
numbers, punctuation), and you drew up the program as streams of BCD
entities that would get manually punched onto cards later.
-ethan