From October 1980 through May 1988 I published a newsletter called Apple Assembly Line. This newsletter focused on assembly language for the Apple ][, //e, //c, and //gs computers. In the beginning all the programs were written for the 6502 microprocessor, but as the Apple II family developed, this expanded to the 65C02, 65802, and 65816. All the programs were published using the S-C Macro Assembler, which I also authored and sold under the label of S-C Software Corporation.
I mailed each issue to subscribers all over the world, over 1000 subscribers at its peak. Many of the subscribers were just learning to program in assembly language, and have since gone on to found software companies of their own, or to work in software development for major corporations. One subscriber I remember well, started when a sophomore in high school. Now he writes image processing software for NASA’s JPL, and was heavily involved in the Mars Rover software.
Here is what someone wrote about Apple Assembly Line:
“This was something more than a newsletter, but not quite a magazine. It was edited and printed by Bob Sander-Cederlof, author of the S-C Macro Assembler, and was written initially for support of that product. It included information about how to write assembly language routines for various projects, and one of Sander-Cederlof’s favorite pastimes was finding ways to squeeze the most code into the fewest bytes possible. Often he would take sections of code from Apple’s system software, disassemble it, and point out how it could have been coded more tightly or efficiently. He also included various products that he or others had written that were useful for other programmers, including a package of extensions for Applesoft that allowed 18 digit precision math functions.” [Steven Weyhrich - Apple II History]
By 1988 interest in Apple II family had waned enough that the company had shrunk to one employee (me), and it would no longer support my family. Since that time I have given permission to three or four individuals to publish the content of the newsletters on their web sites. For some reason none of those sites have had all the issues, and some articles were missing some of the example code. Now I have put all the issues and articles and source code on my own web site.
Bob Sander-Cederlof, January 2005.
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