[TUHS] Re: origin of null-terminated strings

[jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)]

    > From: Bob Supnik

    > The PDP11 had .ASCIZ, starting with Macro11 in 1972.

I was just about to report on my results, after a tiny bit of digging, which
included this. The important datum is that PAL-11 (in DEC-11-GGPB-D, "paper
tape software", April 1970, revised March 1971), which _preceded_ Macro-11,
_does not_ include .ASCIZ (although it has .ASCII). My oldest Macro-11 book
(DEC-11-OMACA-B-D, "BATCH-11/DOS-11 Assembler (MACRO-11)", April 1972, revised
March 1973) does have .ASCIZ. So in the DEC PDP-11 universe, it dates from
sometime between 1970 and 1972.

I'm not sure if Bell had any of the DEC paper tape software: "In early 1970 we
proposed acquisition of a PDP-11, which had just been introduced by
Digital. ... an order for a PDP-11 was placed in May. The processor arrived at
the end of the summer, but the PDP-11 was so new a product that no disk was
available until December. In the meantime, a rudimentary, core-only version of
Unix was written using a cross-assembler on the PDP-7." So the .ASCIZ in
Macro-11 wasn't until a couple of years later.

	 Noel