I finally got up enough gumption to sit down at my trusty ASR-33 to type in a program, assemble it, and run it. I used the sample program – A Sample Editing Job – from DEC’s OS/8 System Reference Manual, chapter 4 (The Symbolic Editor). In this section, the reader is instructed to type in the sample program (prints out “HELLO!”), edit the program to correct errors, assemble the program using PAL, and finally run the program. The program text contains some errors that will be corrected later after all the text is entered. Well, after just 22 minutes, I saw “HELLO!” on my teletype. Typing in the code wasn’t too bad, but took the most time. My first attempt at editing ended prematurely with a Control-C (Quit) due to my frustration over my extreme unfamiliarity with the editor. My second attempt fixed all the errors, but took much longer than it should have, once again due to my unfamiliarity with Edit. The 22 minute computing session has been compressed to just over 8 minutes in the following video:
Old Fellow's Toys 