On 2019-Mar-22, at 11:14 AM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote: > On 3/22/19 10:28 AM, Glen Slick via cctalk wrote: >> On Fri, Mar 22, 2019 at 9:59 AM Chuck Guzis via cctalk >> <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: >>> >>> At the expense of being boo-ed for this, could the original Rockwell >>> stuff perhaps have been assembled using a mainframe/mini-hosted >>> cross-assembler? >>> >>> I'm aware of several situations where this was the case. >> >> The date in the AIM-65 Monitor Program Listing header block in the >> source code is Aug 22, 1978. That is less than 1 year after the >> introduction date of the VAX-11/780. I suppose it still could have >> been something that ran on a VAX by then, or a PDP-11 (or PDP-10?), or >> some other mainframe/mini host if it wasn't self hosted on a Rockwell >> 6502 development system. >> >> It's really just more of a curiosity issue at this point if anyone >> finds a definitive answer. > > Many cross-assemblers for early MPUs were written in (shudder!) FORTRAN. > There were several good reasons for this. > > The first is that if you had a mini or mainframe, you were pretty much > guaranteed to have FORTRAN, which had been implemented under various > standards since 1966. > > The other is that in the 70s, there was still a population of six-bit > character machines not using ASCII, not to forget the ones using EBCDIC. > So hard-coding character sets into programs that were supposed to be > portable over a wide range of machines was an issue. > > I think some of the old FORTRAN code for PALASM may still be around, as > an example.
In that vein: When I was tasked (1980) with producing a cross-assembler and cross-compiler for the 68000 for our R&D sys, (Verex OS / Z language), the first operating target was Motorola's 68000 emulator running on the campus mainframe (MTS on Amdahl / 370). (Followed by hardware, which was a 68000 exerciser board or a bare SUN-1 processor board). I'm pretty sure there was also a 68000 cross-assembler from Moto on the Amdahl, although I'm not sure whether I used it or not, might have to confirm it's output with the output from mine. IIRC the Moto programs were written in Fortran (oops, FORTRAN).
