17 Jun
2026
17 Jun
'26
11:48 a.m.
On Wed, 2026-06-17 at 13:55 -0400, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
A bit tangential, but… speaking of Assembler, I remember hearing
decades ago that Multics was 85% PL/1 and 15% assembler. Has anybody
gotten Multics running on modern hardware, such as Intel? — probably a
better platform for it than the GE 645 or Honeywell 6180.
On Jun 17, 2026, at 11:55 AM, Mark Green via
cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
I recently reviewed a college program that had a COBOL course. It’s
not quite dead in academia.
Speaking of academia: clearly any "academic" who claims Assembler is
dead is unqualified for the job. It may be true that not very much
application code is written in assembler. But it should be obvious
that competence in assembler is absolutely necessary in order to
build a compiler -- in particular, a compiler back-end.