> On Sep 10, 2017, at 1:22 PM, Noel Chiappa via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org>
> wrote:
>
>> From: Brent Hilpert
>
> ...
>
>> When/what/who was the actual first assembler conceived or produced?
>
> A very good question indeed! Does anyone know?
I don't. But I can point to an early example of a quite primitive assembler,
the one in the Electrologica X1 ROM code (you could call that a BIOS). That
was around 1957, written by Dijkstra and described in detail in his Ph.D.
thesis. It has somewhat symbolic instructions (digit/letter, the digit
indicates the operation and the letter the register, e.g., "2A" for "load into
A register"). And it has symbols, but only two characters long, so they were
used to label blocks of data or code, with numeric offsets from there.
paul
