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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.

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  • I've been sent a link to disk which might have a copy of an early version with some source code on it. I need to read it to see what the actual code does (i'm not sure it's actually for the assembler). Thanks to the emailer.
    – PeterI
    Aug 24, 2017 at 23:44
  • Would you mind to emphase the question asked? Maybe bringing it upfront in a seperate paragraph. It's helpful if the target of a question is posted is easy to identify.
    – Raffzahn
    Feb 20, 2018 at 20:28
  • (Not an answer, but a story from the vault) The first thing I did after geting Autostart ROMs was to hack in the mini assembler again - as Hex dump from the old ROMs and relocatiing it on the fly ... incredble what time we did spend on such things back then. Today I'll trow some packege away if I cant get it to work in link half an hour or so. No matter what the price is:)
    – Raffzahn
    Feb 20, 2018 at 20:39
  • EDASM (the one in the Asimov collection) states that it's for ProDOS and needs a disk at minimum. So, if you reverse engineer that one, it probably won't tell you how it ran without a disk drive.
    – paxdiablo
    Sep 1, 2023 at 6:31

1 Answer 1

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I tried looking on www.archive.org (The Internet Archive) and didn't find it there, but try this page, which has several assemblers/text editors (the titles under which the files were uploaded may be different than the 'official' names in the histories):

mirrors.apple2.org.za/ftp.apple.asimov.net/images/programming/assembler/

Scroll down and there are some in the 40+ range of the listings. The site is a mirror of the older Asimov Apple II FTP site.

Hopefully, that will give you a starting point. As for the Internet Archive, how you word your searches (use the text search box on the right-hand side of the homepage, and I'd at least use the terms "Apple II", assembler, "text editor". and other words in the strict Apple name (or other nicknames) for the software you have. I have that ProDOS Assembler Toolkit, though I didn't get very far with it at that time (probably, I should get back to doing that, eh?)...

An update; I found that Internet Archive does have the manual for the ProDOS Assembler Toolkit (PDF and other formats) here:

https://archive.org/details/EDASM-ProDOS_Assembler_Tools_Manual

You may be able to find the disk image from that page - check if there are related links at the bottom of that page.

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  • @PeterI - an update; I found that Internet Archive does have the manual for the ProDOS Assembler Toolkit (PDF and other formats) here: archive.org/details/EDASM-ProDOS_Assembler_Tools_Manual Feb 20, 2018 at 20:47
  • Somewhere I have the hard copy version for ProDOS 1.0(ish). I was more interested in the early TED/ASM & Randys weekend assembler, but thanks.
    – PeterI
    Feb 22, 2018 at 9:39

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