> On Feb 26, 2016, at 7:13 PM, Clem Cole <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
> On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 6:28 PM, Nigel Williams
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> Perhaps not unusual for the 1960s but laborious none-the-less.
>
> Depends who you are. For grins look for the original Cray-1 "assembler"
> box. You'll discover there are no mnemonics like "add", "branch" - just
> octal codes. Seymor didn't need them.
Obviously, to get an assembler you'd first have to bootstrap *that*, unless you
could write a cross-assembler. And early assemblers weren't necessarily all
that fancy.
I've been reading some 1950s era computer descriptions, for machines without
assemblers. Opcodes are simply written as op/addr so you'd remember, say, that
0 is add and 6 is store, and so forth. A machine introduced in Holland in 1958
-- the EL-X1 -- had a very bare-bones assembler, or slightly smart loader,
depending on how you'd want to think about it. Just a few hundred
instructions; it had opcodes like "0A" (add to A) or "6S" (store S register).
And it had symbolic addresses, but you couldn't label individual locations,
only "paragraphs" because symbols were only pairs of one of 13 letters, i.e., a
max of 169 symbols per program. Still, with that primitive tool some large
software was written, such as the world's first ALGOL compiler.
It isn't really all that much harder than a modern assembler once you get used
to the different look.
paul
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