On Mon, 2021-06-21 at 08:26 -0700, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote: > Sigh. It's a shame that absolute (machine language) coding isn't taught > anymore. The 1620 (and probably other IBM hardware) even had coding > forms for it--pencil-and-paper assembly coding. My recollection is > that the absolute forms were on the reverse side of the SPS coding form. > If you don't have another system to provide cross compilation/assembly, > you bootstrap from machine code.
IBM provided coding forms for the 1401, for both SPS and Autocoder. They provided a "pocket reference card" for absolute machine code. The machine had two one-character data registers that connected the CPU to core, and two address registers. Three index registers were in core. Univac provided a pocket reference card for the 1108, but didn't bother with coding forms because assembler input was free form.
