History of assembly language

Answer 1

Assembly Language History

The first assembler appears in the early mainframe computer EDSAC in late 1940s

Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) was an early British computer. The machine, having been inspired by John von Neumann's seminal First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, was constructed by Maurice Wilkes and his team at the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory in England. EDSAC was the first practical stored-program electronic computer.EDSAC ran its first programs on 6 May 1949, when it calculated a table of squares and a list of prime numbers.

The initial orders were hard-wired on a set of uniselector switches and loaded into the low words of memory at startup. By May 1949, the initial orders provided a primitive relocating assembler taking advantage of the mnemonic design described above, all in 31 words. This is the world's first assembler, and arguably the start of the global software industry!

After this ,many assemblers appears on various mainframes ,,including Regional Assembly Language assembler, Whirlwind assembler and Rochester assembler and many others.

a large number of programs have been written entirely in assembly language. Operating systems were almost exclusively written in assembly language until the widespread acceptance of C in the 1970s and early 1980s. Many commercial applications were written in assembly language as well, including a large amount of the IBM mainframe software written by large corporations. COBOL and FORTRAN eventually displaced much of this work, although a number of large organizations retained assembly-language application infrastructures well into the 90s.

In the 1980s,TASM and MASM were development by borland and microsoft,many famous applications run on PC are written in assembly language.But like the situation on mainframe,when PC is powerful ,more and more applications are written in high level computer language like c/c++/Java.

Later, new fetures are added to assembly language:some assemblers have incorporated structured programming elements to encode execution flow .A new generation of assembly language appears these years named "typed assembly language " on which assembly language is extended to include a method of annotating the datatype of each value that is manipulated by the code .

In my opinion,The most common use of assembly language is Win32 assembly programming by computer hobbyiest .The assembler on linux named "AS" is usually only used by driver developer.