Interesting article. In it you mention programming the VIC-20 using a cartridge with which you could write Assembly code, but without the benefit of labels. There was another option for the VIC-20. I wrote and marketed an assembler called, modestly enough, The Assembler for the VIC-20. It was and still is, to the best of my knowledge, the tiniest assembler ever written that supported labels. It ran on the undexpanded VIC and even supported address expressions using +, -,/, *, AND, OR, ^ (exponentiation)! You could also specify text and hex strings and even have comments in your code. It all ran in the 3583 bytes of available memory on the VIC. You could save the object code to tape for later loading with a separate program called The Loader. Of course your Assembly source had share memory with The Assembler, so it could only be about 150 lines long, and you could only get that many lines of code if you stuck to very short labels, though it supported labels up to 70 characters long.
I think the Epson HX-80 preceded the Tandy TRS-80 Model 100 by two years and was the first laptop ever made. It had 16K of RAM, a 4x20 character LCD display and an optional cassette tape recorder. You could buy a 16K expansion card if you needed to do advanced applications. It had Microsoft Basic in ROM.
It was my first laptop computer and was actually useful to me. I programmed it to function as a point-of-sale computer for computing sales tax and totals and balancing the till at trade shows when I had my Commodore 64 software business.
Oops, I was the anonymous coward who wrote that, thinking I was logged in. If anyone reading this bought The Assembler, sometimes called French Silk, the name of my company at the time, I would like to hear from you. Either reply to this or to D C French @ gmail dot com. I would be especially thrilled if someone still actually has a working copy of the original cassette and wouldn't mind parting with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting article. In it you mention programming the VIC-20 using a cartridge with which you could write Assembly code, but without the benefit of labels. There was another option for the VIC-20. I wrote and marketed an assembler called, modestly enough, The Assembler for the VIC-20. It was and still is, to the best of my knowledge, the tiniest assembler ever written that supported labels. It ran on the undexpanded VIC and even supported address expressions using +, -, /, *, AND, OR, ^ (exponentiation)! You could also specify text and hex strings and even have comments in your code. It all ran in the 3583 bytes of available memory on the VIC. You could save the object code to tape for later loading with a separate program called The Loader. Of course your Assembly source had share memory with The Assembler, so it could only be about 150 lines long, and you could only get that many lines of code if you stuck to very short labels, though it supported labels up to 70 characters long.
As long as you are going to be sending this story to all the hot babes you know, you might want to attach this link from the Best of Craig's List: http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/sfo/66795671. html
Frozen chickens?
I think the Epson HX-80 preceded the Tandy TRS-80 Model 100 by two years and was the first laptop ever made. It had 16K of RAM, a 4x20 character LCD display and an optional cassette tape recorder. You could buy a 16K expansion card if you needed to do advanced applications. It had Microsoft Basic in ROM. It was my first laptop computer and was actually useful to me. I programmed it to function as a point-of-sale computer for computing sales tax and totals and balancing the till at trade shows when I had my Commodore 64 software business.
Oops, I was the anonymous coward who wrote that, thinking I was logged in. If anyone reading this bought The Assembler, sometimes called French Silk, the name of my company at the time, I would like to hear from you. Either reply to this or to D C French @ gmail dot com. I would be especially thrilled if someone still actually has a working copy of the original cassette and wouldn't mind parting with it.