How were the first microprocessors programmed?(electronics.stackexchange.com) |
How were the first microprocessors programmed?(electronics.stackexchange.com) |
To avoid stepping through several hundred lines of instructions before reaching a particular routine say floating-point arithmetic, I would set beginning of the routine in question at a convenient address like 0x400, and wire the address line (A10) to break the program.
I have created several useful products using these humble tools.
Commercially, we commonly used cross assemblers or cross compilers and simulators that ran on minicomputers (like DEC VAXen). We could then burn the output to PROMs to put in the target machine for final debugging. Later we used a more specialized cross development environment (HP 64000 and Intel MDS) which had a big cable tied to a pod that plugged into the CPU socket on the target, allowing much more sophisticated debugging.