No AI or OCR here, just an idiot with too much free time. After seeing that the AltaBASIC source posted was a scan of paper tape, I thought having it in a digital document proper would be good for preservation and novelty's sake. I've never written Assembly, and I'm not a typography expert! Feel free to point and laugh at any silly mistakes. Let's see how many days it takes!
It's not "paper tape" (that's a digital storage medium), just a printout. And the numbers in the left half are not actually part of the source file, they are line numbers and machine code output produced by the assembler. You'd probably better not waste time transcribing them.
Not trying to dissuade you, but here's some things you should consider:
• Turn off your spell checker, it will only make this more difficult! It certainly won't help with the code itself, and it seems like you want to reproduce everything perfectly, including typos in the comments.
• I'd strongly suggest to at the very least become a bit familiar with 8080 assembly language before attempting this.
• The tools used to produce this output add another layer of complications. They used the PDP10 system's assembler with a set of macros to adapt it to generate 8080 code, so it's using somewhat different syntax and directives than those of 8080-native assemblers (like the ones from Intel or Digital Research).
• Some characters are hard to read, and without knowledge of the context and at least some of the PDP10-specific syntax it will be impossible to just guess. E.g. decimal numbers are sometimes prefixed with '^D', and octal numbers with '^O', which look quite similar in this scan. The 'RADIX' directive changes the default for when there is no such prefix, it should be 10 for most of it, but I think that it does start out as octal. Memory addresses will be octal (like 'RAMBOT==^O20000' in line 13), ASCII characters could be either but they seem to prefer decimal for those ('^D13' is CR, '^D10' is LF).
Even if the source is already transcribed anywhere, I'm interested at what your experience will be if you keep going all the way through. A lot of authors have done things like rewrite Shakespeare plays or famous novels out by hand and claim to have got a lot of the experience of feeling like they were getting into the author's mind and stuff.. I wonder if typing this out could be similarly enlightening.
Trolling or nah? If the author of this link is struggling with spell check and hasn't written assembly language before, this doesn't provide much confidence for an accurate transcription of the source code printout.
Good luck on the exercise, though! Don't worry, Bill and his legal team will be watching you closely. They'll be cheering you on (but not for the reasons you think they will be.)
Please read Bill Gates's Letter to Hobbyists and don't do this. He's not going to be happy that people are ripping off his Altair BASIC and not giving him any money. What you're doing is just not fair to him.
No AI or OCR here, just an idiot with too much free time. After seeing that the AltaBASIC source posted was a scan of paper tape, I thought having it in a digital document proper would be good for preservation and novelty's sake. I've never written Assembly, and I'm not a typography expert! Feel free to point and laugh at any silly mistakes. Let's see how many days it takes!
It's not "paper tape" (that's a digital storage medium), just a printout. And the numbers in the left half are not actually part of the source file, they are line numbers and machine code output produced by the assembler. You'd probably better not waste time transcribing them.
Not trying to dissuade you, but here's some things you should consider:
• Turn off your spell checker, it will only make this more difficult! It certainly won't help with the code itself, and it seems like you want to reproduce everything perfectly, including typos in the comments.
• I'd strongly suggest to at the very least become a bit familiar with 8080 assembly language before attempting this.
• The tools used to produce this output add another layer of complications. They used the PDP10 system's assembler with a set of macros to adapt it to generate 8080 code, so it's using somewhat different syntax and directives than those of 8080-native assemblers (like the ones from Intel or Digital Research).
• Some characters are hard to read, and without knowledge of the context and at least some of the PDP10-specific syntax it will be impossible to just guess. E.g. decimal numbers are sometimes prefixed with '^D', and octal numbers with '^O', which look quite similar in this scan. The 'RADIX' directive changes the default for when there is no such prefix, it should be 10 for most of it, but I think that it does start out as octal. Memory addresses will be octal (like 'RAMBOT==^O20000' in line 13), ASCII characters could be either but they seem to prefer decimal for those ('^D13' is CR, '^D10' is LF).
Best of luck. I hope that you don't fizzle out at some point, but I suppose 10 lines a day isn't too daunting a task.
I wonder if MS has this code somewhere in a digital vault.
I'm having a struggle with this computer, it loves to correct Altair to Alta and I keep forgetting to correct it. Whoops.
Let's hope it doesn't autocorrect too much of the asm...
You can add an exclusion or exception to your applicable spell check
Even if the source is already transcribed anywhere, I'm interested at what your experience will be if you keep going all the way through. A lot of authors have done things like rewrite Shakespeare plays or famous novels out by hand and claim to have got a lot of the experience of feeling like they were getting into the author's mind and stuff.. I wonder if typing this out could be similarly enlightening.
I don’t want to spoil your efforts, but I think the source is already online: https://github.com/option8/Altair-BASIC
There's a difference between the original source code and an annotated disassembly, even for assembly code.
It's good to check against.
Trolling or nah? If the author of this link is struggling with spell check and hasn't written assembly language before, this doesn't provide much confidence for an accurate transcription of the source code printout.
Good luck on the exercise, though! Don't worry, Bill and his legal team will be watching you closely. They'll be cheering you on (but not for the reasons you think they will be.)
There were Basic clones for the Altair, you don't need propietary ones.
Heck, even CP/M 2.2 it's free software today.
Please read Bill Gates's Letter to Hobbyists and don't do this. He's not going to be happy that people are ripping off his Altair BASIC and not giving him any money. What you're doing is just not fair to him.
Bill Gates? From Macrosoft(?) Do you think that company is going somewhere or nah?