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<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>Or program in binary. Like originally.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
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<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- Original Message ----- </DIV>
<DIV
style="FONT: 10pt arial; BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; font-color: black"><B>From:</B>
<A title=paulkoning@comcast.net href="mailto:paulkoning@comcast.net">Paul
Koning</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>To:</B> <A title=clemc@ccc.com
href="mailto:clemc@ccc.com">Clem Cole</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Cc:</B> <A title=simh@trailing-edge.com
href="mailto:simh@trailing-edge.com">SIMH</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Sent:</B> Saturday, February 27, 2016 2:01
PM</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Subject:</B> Re: [Simh] pdp11 and unix</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV><BR>> On Feb 26, 2016, at 7:13 PM, Clem Cole <<A
href="mailto:clemc@ccc.com">clemc@ccc.com</A>> wrote:<BR>> <BR>>
<BR>> On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 6:28 PM, Nigel Williams <<A
href="mailto:nw@retrocomputingtasmania.com">nw@retrocomputingtasmania.com</A>>
wrote:<BR>> Perhaps not unusual for the 1960s but laborious
none-the-less.<BR>> <BR>> 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. <BR><BR>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. <BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>It isn't really all that much harder than a modern
assembler once you get used to the different
look.<BR><BR>paul<BR><BR>_______________________________________________<BR>Simh
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