I wrote the native-code assembler for the 4004/4040 Intel Microprocessor development system which was compatible with the cross assembler system that ran on IBM

I wrote the native-code assembler for the 4004/4040 Intel Microprocessor development system which was compatible with the cross assembler system that ran on IBM 360 hardware. Tom Pittman wrote a eprom-resident assembler for the 4004 development board notable because the opcodes were chosen to allow the table in which they were stored to be executable code in order to save space. Coding for the 4-bit limited resource 4004/4040 necessarily involved being very close to the machine. At the 2nd Asilomar Microprocessor Workshop the virtues of coding for the 4004 in split-octal was hotly debated with Matt Biewer of Pro Log, an early embedded systems house, arguing in the affirmative. Those of use who supported higher-level programming languages were in the lunatic fringe. Some even thought that assemblers were confusing.