> On Jan 10, 2017, at 11:37 AM, Phil Budne <p...@ultimate.com> wrote:
>
> 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.
Could be. I took it to be PDP11 Assembly Language, but I'll admit that was
just made up on the spot and I never saw a real explanation.
> ISTR PAL-11A was also an "absolute" assembler (did not output REL
> files), but there was also a PAL-11R.
The PAL I remember was part of the Paper Tape Software package for the PDP-11.
Two pass assembler, you actually had to feed it the source tape twice, if I
remember the manual right. (I never had to use it for real.)
There's also a non-Macro assembler for RT11 for systems with just 8k of memory.
ASEMBL.SAV? It came with a separate macro processor called EXPAND, so you
could assemble PDP-11 assembly code with macros, it just took more steps.
paul
