Re: Why do we still assemble?

Jim Camelford wrote:
> I find it so funny to read this some 12 years after it was written ... but I
> was hunting around for a reference to a FREE C++ compiler and found it. I
> was a senior systems programs at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario
> Canda in the late 70's and was responsible for writing patches to the B6700
> MCP, doing system updates and so forth. And, I also got a chance to write a
> LOT of ALGOL By my estimation, some 50,000 lines of patches, full programs
> and the like over 5 years. Gee it was a lot of fun - at 3AM when we got the
> machine. And, as a lark, I did write a real Assembler for the B6700. You
> could literally write a program in the mnemonics - just like a real
> Assembler - and it compiled and ran. Yeah, you could cause a lot of
> trouble - and so we tended to fiddle with this sort of thing only very early
> in the morning. I did a paper, as part of my BSC, in the mid 70's on the
> B6700's compiler structure so I knew how to write a compiler and generate
> code files from scratch. I still have the original copy of the paper. Too
> bad - but every 50,000 lines of that code was lost when Queen's eventually
> purged all their tape archives and it was lost. Yes, I worked on
> implementations of STUFOR and the Australian Pascal compiler - both of which
> we temporarily mounted. If anyone's interested in a copy of the original
> "How To Write A Burroughs Compiler" document, eMail me. it would be fun.
> Especialy to see if anyone sees this after some 12 years.
>
> BTW, the Burroughs architecture was the most impressive computer
> architecture ever invented. How our world might have been different if the
> PC adopted the stack machine architecture in the maintstream.


Jim, LOL, Forths for everyone !!! rofl.
yay!


at one time, before x86 hardware was impressive, I played with an IBM
s/34.


They were not unreasonably sized given their age and were fairly fast
and i wanted one. Dreams change.


Has anyone implemented a Burroughs emulator?


Thanks much for sharing your memories.
[This has veered away from compilers. Note followup address. -John]

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