23 Feb
2015
23 Feb
'15
9:40 p.m.
On 02/23/2015 09:17 PM, Ian S. King wrote:
My first (paid) programming job was in 6800 assembler,
using the Motorola
EXORCISER system. It took hours (as in a major part of a day, longer than
the work day) to reassemble the entire code base, so we would patch the
program in the PROM programmer. We would, of course, back port the changes
in symbolic assembler to the source, and every few days just take the
downtime hit to rebuild the code base. Keep in mind that this was natively
hosted on a 6800 system.
Well, I *know* that there was a cross-assembler for 6800 code. Even a
moderately small minicomputer would outpace a 6800.
Patching is okay, as long as it doesn't become permanent. I have a
memory of 7080 COBOL production programs patched with Autocoder object.
Of course, nobody knew exactly what the patches did.
One of the very good reasons to run legacy programs on emulation.
I'm certain there are thousands of these stories.
--Chuck