>"Because IBM dominated the computer market all Sac State computer science students had to learn BAL (Basic Assembly Language) used on the IBM System/360, 370 a

>"Because IBM dominated the computer market all Sac State computer science students had to learn BAL (Basic Assembly Language) used on the IBM System/360, 370 and later mainframes. Students had to prove their mastery of BAL by writing a working assembler, BASIC interpreter, simple compiler, operating system and data base. To stop cheating completed student program listings, card decks and outputs were collected and stored in a locked area that faculty members reviewed to ensure students did not copy prior programs." >"Bill recognized that all he needed was for the Intel 8008 to run the same BAL instructions. Bill had just finished a large graduate student project that created the firmware to make an IBM System 3 minicomputer run on a 4K based VLSI based computer. Bill simply changed that code so BAL also ran on the Intel 8008. This ability to run BAL let Bill's team pick and choose between the best student programs. They soon had the Sac State 8008 running DOS (Disk Operating System) which allowed loading and starting programs stored on paper tape, cassette tape, cartridge tape, and even their mobile pluggable 3/2 (three megabytes fixed, two removable) hard disk system. They had it running a simple BASIC interpreter. Because the BAL firmware ran so slow, Bill’s team also built a BAL assembler which instead of putting out one machine code instruction per human readable instruction put out all the code needed to run in 8008 machine code."