In computer programming, assembly language, often abbreviated asm, is any low-level programming language in which there is a very strong correspondence between the instructions in the language and the architecture's machine code instructions. Because assembly depends on the machine code instructions, every assembler has its own assembly language which is designed for exactly one specific computer architecture. Assembly language may also be called symbolic machine code.
A compiler is a computer program that translates computer code written in one programming language into another language. The name compiler is primarily used for programs that translate source code from a high-level programming language to a lower level language to create an executable program.
A computer program is a collection of instructions that can be executed by a computer to perform a specific task. Most computer devices require programs to function properly.
The Intel 8080 ("eighty-eighty") was the second 8-bit microprocessor designed and manufactured by Intel and was released in April 1974. It is an extended and enhanced variant of the earlier 8008 design, although without binary compatibility. The initial specified clock rate or frequency limit was 2 MHz, and with common instructions using 4, 5, 7, 10, or 11 cycles this meant that it operated at a typical speed of a few hundred thousand instructions per second. A faster variant 8080A-1 became available later with clock frequency limit up to 3.125 MHz.
Procedural programming is a programming paradigm, derived from structured programming, based on the concept of the procedure call. Procedures, also known as routines, subroutines, or functions, simply contain a series of computational steps to be carried out. Any given procedure might be called at any point during a program's execution, including by other procedures or itself. The first major procedural programming languages appeared circa 1957–1964, including Fortran, ALGOL, COBOL, PL/I and BASIC. Pascal and C were published circa 1970–1972.
The TRS-80 Micro Computer System is a desktop microcomputer launched in 1977 and sold by Tandy Corporation through their RadioShack stores. The name is an abbreviation of Tandy/RadioShack, Z80 microprocessor. It is one of the earliest mass-produced and mass-marketed retail home computers.
The Z80 is an 8-bit microprocessor introduced by Zilog as the startup company's first product. The Z80 was conceived by Federico Faggin in late 1974 and developed by him and his 11 employees starting in early 1975. The first working samples were delivered in March 1976, and it was officially introduced on the market in July 1976. With the revenue from the Z80, the company built its own chip factories and grew to over a thousand employees over the following two years.
CP/M, originally standing for Control Program/Monitor and later Control Program for Microcomputers, is a mass-market operating system created in 1974 for Intel 8080/85-based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. Initially confined to single-tasking on 8-bit processors and no more than 64 kilobytes of memory, later versions of CP/M added multi-user variations and were migrated to 16-bit processors.
A microcomputer is a small, relatively inexpensive computer with a microprocessor as its central processing unit (CPU). It includes a microprocessor, memory and minimal input/output (I/O) circuitry mounted on a single printed circuit board (PCB). Microcomputers became popular in the 1970s and 1980s with the advent of increasingly powerful microprocessors. The predecessors to these computers, mainframes and minicomputers, were comparatively much larger and more expensive. Many microcomputers are also personal computers.
Tiny BASIC is a dialect of the BASIC programming language that can fit into as little as 2 or 3 KB of memory. This small size made it invaluable in the early days of microcomputers in the mid-1970s, when typical memory size was only 4 to 8 KB. To meet these strict size limits, math was purely integer based and it lacked arrays.
The Intel 8085 ("eighty-eighty-five") is an 8-bit microprocessor produced by Intel and introduced in March 1976. It is a software-binary compatible with the more-famous Intel 8080 with only two minor instructions added to support its added interrupt and serial input/output features. However, it requires less support circuitry, allowing simpler and less expensive microcomputer systems to be built.
Microsoft BASIC is the foundation software product of the Microsoft company. It first appeared in 1975 as Altair BASIC, which was the first version of BASIC published by Microsoft as well as the first high-level programming language available for the Altair 8800 microcomputer.
MBASIC is the Microsoft BASIC implementation of BASIC for the CP/M operating system. MBASIC is a descendant of the original Altair BASIC interpreters that were among Microsoft's first products. MBASIC was one of the two versions of BASIC bundled with the Osborne 1 computer. The name "MBASIC" is derived from the disk file name MBASIC.COM of the BASIC interpreter.
Equivalence partitioning or equivalence class partitioning (ECP) is a software testing technique that divides the input data of a software unit into partitions of equivalent data from which test cases can be derived. In principle, test cases are designed to cover each partition at least once. This technique tries to define test cases that uncover classes of errors, thereby reducing the total number of test cases that must be developed. An advantage of this approach is reduction in the time required for testing software due to lesser number of test cases.
A source-to-source translator, source-to-source compiler, transcompiler or transpiler is a type of translator that takes the source code of a program written in a programming language as its input and produces an equivalent source code in the same or a different programming language. A source-to-source translator converts between programming languages that operate at approximately the same level of abstraction, while a traditional compiler translates from a higher level programming language to a lower level programming language. For example, a source-to-source compiler may perform a translation of a program from Python to JavaScript, while a traditional compiler translates from a language like C to assembler or Java to bytecode. An automatic parallelizing compiler will frequently take in a high level language program as an input and then transform the code and annotate it with parallel code annotations or language constructs.
BASICODE was a computer project intended to create a unified standard for the BASIC programming language. BASIC was available on many popular home computers, but there were countless variants that were mostly incompatible with each other. The project was initiated in 1980 by Hobbyscoop, a radio program of the Dutch broadcasting organisation Nederlandse Omroep Stichting (NOS).
The Parallax P8X32A Propeller is a multi-core processor parallel computer architecture microcontroller chip with eight 32-bit reduced instruction set computer (RISC) central processing unit (CPU) cores. Introduced in 2006, it is designed and sold by Parallax, Inc.
The DAI personal computer is a rare, early home computer from the Belgian company Data Applications International. The DAI came to market in 1980. It provided many pioneering features such as high resolution color graphics, a maths co-processor, and a pre-compiling BASIC interpreter. However, it never became a commercial success.
An access method is a function of a mainframe operating system that enables access to data on disk, tape or other external devices. They were introduced in 1963 in IBM OS/360 operating system. Access methods provide an application programming interface (API) for programmers to transfer data to or from device, and could be compared to device drivers in non-mainframe operating systems, but typically provide a greater level of functionality.
The TRS-80 Model 4 is the last Z80-based home computer family by Radio Shack, sold from April 1983 through autumn 1991.
