CodeArchaeology

The symbolic order code of the Cambridge EDSAC, loaded by David Wheeler's Initial Orders — widely described as the world's first assembler, and the system that introduced the subroutine library, the relocating loader and the programming textbook.

The assembly language of the MC6809, the 1978 processor its own designers called "the best 8 bit machine so far made by human" — 59 orthogonal instructions, 1464 instruction-and-addressing-mode combinations, two stacks, a movable direct page, and program-counter-relative addressing built for position-independent ROM code.

The assembly language of DEC's 32-bit VAX — a CISC instruction set so orthogonal and so ornate that it could evaluate a polynomial or format a currency field in a single instruction, and the language most of the VMS kernel was written in.

The 16-bit assembly language Intel defined for the 8086 in 1978 — ASM86, a deliberately strongly typed assembler with segmented addressing, PTR overrides and user-definable codemacros — and the source-level bridge that carried 8080 programs into the x86 era.

A comprehensive catalog of 1,200+ programming languages from computing history, with dates, status, paradigms, and categories.

The Blitz dialect that grew a Windows GUI — Mark Sibly's 2003 compiler kept the one-button BASIC of Blitz3D but added an event-driven Gadget system, so the same language that drew sprites could also build a native desktop application.