There were plenty of assemblers around, some even native.  Heck, I wrote
both an 8008 and an 8080 cross-assembler (in FORTRAN, naturally).  It's
not rocket science.  One friend of mine wrote his assembler as macros
for a mainframe assembler.  That, at once, gave him all of the advanced
facilities of the host assembler.  Wish I'd thought of that...

So, I wrote my primitive little 8080 assembler, in Fortran-77. I started using it the next day, and my manager asked where I got it. After I told him, he said that I should have asked him first, because he could have put together one using editor macros pretty easily - in less than a week, he estimated. The fact that I knew nothing about macros notwithstanding, I noticed I thereafter got a lot more autonomy when I told him I wrote mine in a single (longish) day...
~~
Mark Moulding

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