The apple ][ history site https://apple2history.org/history/ah17/#05 has a section on assemblers with these interesting snippets:
TED/ASM: Developed at Apple and smuggled out the doors around May 1978, this assembler had memory conflicts with DOS, so they couldn’t be used together. The text editor module was written by Randy Wigginton, and the assembler was written by Gary Shannon. In the early days, it was the only assembler they had available that would run on an Apple II.[21]
RANDY’S WEEKEND ASSEMBLER: Also written by Randy Wigginton, this one slipped out of Apple in September 1978. The text editor was written mostly in SWEET-16 (Wozniak’s 16-bit emulator in the Integer BASIC ROM), and was therefore slow. Unfortunately, it had its own set of bugs.
Now I'm pretty sure that TED/ASM morphed in the EDASM combo in the Applesoft toolkit (which also was the ProDOS assembler) which I used in the early eighties.
I've been trying to find both of these early assemblers online (I'm interested in how they worked without a floppy disk) and I can't find them. Has anyone found either of them anywhere? Ideally I'd like to get hold of the source code to them but I suspect that's completely unavailable and I'll need to reverse engineer EDASM instead.
This also begs the question how Big Mac & Merlin didn't get sued for copyright since some of the code according to the Apple ][ history pages was disassembled TED/ASM. Anyone know of the history around this?
Edit Done some more research and found a copy of the call-A.P.P.L.E. issue referenced by apple2history.org above.
TED/ASM The first Apple assembler I encountered was one developed by Apple and smuggled out the doors around May 1978. The text editor part was written by Randy Wiggington and the assembler was written by Gary Shannon. The text editor is fairly good; it is line-oriented, but it manages the line numbers for you. The assembler appeared to be a decent design (long labels, sweet 16 instructions) but was riddled with a variety of bugs. One main problem is that the text editor had memory conflicts with DOS so they couldn't be used together. But I was still quite pleased to obtain it as it was, far better than anything else around at the time (which wasn't hard; nothing else was around at the time)
..snip..
Randy's Weekend Assembler Randy's Weekend Assembler (it assembles on weekdays, too!) found its way out of Apple around September 1978. It features a new version of Randy's text editor that is written mostly in Sweet 16 and includes far better intraline editing than the earlier version. Its search operations are kind of slow, though. The assembler, alas, had different pseudo-ops than Shannon's and its own set of bugs. I wrote my own front end to allow it to be used with DOS and thought I had a usable assembler, though a far cry from an ideal one.
Up to this point (Fall 1978) the only assemblers available were the Microproducts 4-character label assembler and whatever managed to leak out of Apple. Source code for Gary Shannon's original Apple assembler appeared on the hobbyist grapevine, spawning many different versions with many of the bugs fixed.
So the source code was available and might still be somewhere.
