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Red Book Assembler

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A few months ago there was some discussion about what assembler Woz & co.
used on the Monitor firmware listings in the Red Book manual of January
1978. Just from looking at these listings, it should have been obvious that
they used a cross-assembler on a mainframe computer. I don't recall that
this bit of information came up, but the subject came up again last evening
when I was reading, so without further ado, I present an excerpt from part 6
of Dr. Weyhrich's Apple II History:


 John Arkley at Apple wrote the changes to the original Monitor ROM and
 created the Autostart ROM in November 1978 (he's the "John A" mentioned in
 the source code listing found in the 1981 edition of the APPLE II REFERENCE
 MANUAL).  After he had done the work and the ROMs had been created, Apple
 wanted to publish a new version of the Reference Manual to cover the
 AppleII Plus.  The older Reference Manual (affectionately known as the "Red
 Book") had included an assembly language source code listing of the Monitor
 ROM.  They wanted to include the source for BOTH versions of the Monitor,
 but a problem came up.  While developing the Monitor, Apple had used a
 local mainframe computer dial-up service known as "Call Computer."  They
 used a cross-assembler on that computer, assembled the code, and then used
 the resulting object code to create the ROM.  (A cross-assembler is an
 assembler that creates object code for a processor other than the one the
 cross-assembler runs on.  For example, if you can write 8080 machine code
 with an assembler running on a 6502-based computer, you are using a
 cross-assembler).  Unfortunately, Call Computer had accidentally done a
 system backup with the source and destination disks reversed, erasing all
 the files containing the source code for the AppleII Monitors.  There were
 no disk or cassette copies of the source code for the Autostart ROM back at
 Apple.  Working from the source listing in the Red Book, John recreated the
 source file for the original Monitor, and then disassembled his own
 modifications for the IIPlus and re-created his Autostart ROM source file. 
 Those reconstructed listings are what appeared in the 1981 edition of the
 AppleII Reference Manual.

-- 
]DF$
Apple II Book: http://macgui.com/newa2guide/
Usenet: http://macgui.com/usenet/  <-- get posts by email!
Apple II Web & Blog hosting: http://a2hq.com/

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Red Book Assembler D Finnigan <dog_cow@macgui.com> - 2014-12-07 22:49 +0000
  Re: Red Book Assembler D Finnigan <dog_cow@macgui.com> - 2014-12-09 00:58 +0000
    Re: Red Book Assembler "Bill Garber" <willy46pa@comcast.net> - 2014-12-08 22:11 -0500

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