This Link

on open hardware has been linked before.

Amazingly it is still online.

Valuable Erroneous Quotatations

There is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all who profit by the old order. Machiavelli 1513

The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. Karl Marx, mid 19^th cent.

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries. Winston Churchill, mid 20^th cent.

The collision of alphabetic and electronic culture borders typical for the 20th century grants the printed word a decisive role for the inhibition of our return to the Africa within ourselves. Marshall McLuhan, 1962

The evolution of the PC proceeded similar to the development of the printed book, but it took only fourty years instead of sixhundred. Alan Kay, 1977

among the many lazily collected from www.vordenker.de www.worldofquotes.com www.quotationspage.com

Assembly Language

Computers are instructed to do what they do by bit patterns. These bit patterns can be represented in different ways. As positions of a row of switches, as patterns of 0 and 1 characters, as decimal or hexadecimal figures of the values to which these bit patterns would compute or as strings from a catalog where the "meaning" of the bit pattern would be expressed in an abbriviation of, say, 3 characters.

For example "LDA" would represent the bit pattern that instructs a certain type of processor to LoaD its Accumulator.

Assembly language then consists of a catalog of such strings representing each legal instruction pattern, and a syntax (mainly for adressing). Assembly language mostly also offers a scheme to go to a sequence of these instructions and back in a symbolic rather than numerical way (library call), patterns for symbolic memory adressing (variables) and hiding of rudimentary memory management (e.g. automatic allocation and deallocation of variable storage space).

It is easier for a human to use than the other mentioned representations (which also need translation). It is also easy to program a (nearly 1:1) "translator" for stored files of these sequences. These translation/library/memory management programms are what we call Assemblers. Many people use the word also for the designation of assembly language.

Humans can use their intimate knowledge of subleties in specific computer architecture to optimize critical sequences in these programs.

A.L. is different for each kind of computer or CPU. Only the innermost cores of operating systems and the most time critical parts of other systems are thus written, adapted, optimized and translated for specific machines.