Yep, though that's some perverse architecture to an IBM person! I'd been writing 370 assembler for several years on my second attempt at a university degree. One of the classes had us writing a game in assembler on a Commodore 64. The toy assembler was frustrating to work with because it was so primitive. No DS 0H, for example, so I had to do EQU * on labels.
My game...mostly worked: I couldn't be arsed to count things carefully, so it got a bit confused about the edges of the screen, but otherwise it worked. And we were handing in source code, not demonstrating operation. I got 48/50. My friend was up until 4AM. His game worked PERFECTLY. He got a 44/50. We were both pissed: him because he knew mine was half-assed but I got a higher mark, and me because the two points I got marked down for were (1) those EQU *, which the TA didn't understand; and (2) for having functions (subroutines) that returned a binary value via a condition code, which the TA somehow thought was evil. I went to the prof--the much-lauded Wes Graham--whose reaction was "48 is a decent mark". Um, sure, thanks: encourage mediocrity and complacency. I already knew that he was a glory-hog and lousy lecturer; this did not improve his standing. Anyway, it didn't matter, because I dropped out again shortly thereafter, but knowing real assembler sure made learning that toy assembler easy! -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Schmitt, Michael Sent: Tuesday, February 24, 2026 2:17 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: is Assembler dying? (was: CDW - Three new Mainframe Openings) When I took the university assembly language course it taught COMPASS, for a CDC Cyber mainframe. It used: * Octal * 18 bit address registers * 60 bit data registers So it had no direct relevance for IBM mainframes, where I started with Assembler H, I think. Or maybe Assembler F. But what was valuable was the concepts of what assembly language and machine programming is. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
