Anybody good at disassembly????

From: Brian Chase <bdc_at_world.std.com>
Date: Thu Jun 28 15:11:07 2001

On Thu, 28 Jun 2001, Gene Ehrich wrote:

> I remember back in the early days at IBM right before the 360 was announced
> that they were talking in the industry of the possibility of a
> disassembler. Most people poo-poo'd it as impossible. Datamation magazine
> had a cartoon with a picture of a machine labeled disassembler with a
> conveyer belt on each side. A worker was feeding cans of applesauce into
> the machine and on the other side apples were coming out.

Maybe hindsight is always 20/20, but I don't see why machine code
disassembly would be viewed as an impossible task? I mean, weren't people
able to look at hex or octal dumps and translate them into the
corresponding mnemonics? This generally isn't a task that requires a high
IQ, it's basically a simple lookup operation. Hell, the problem is better
suited to computer based solutions than it is to people doing it.

-brian.
Received on Thu Jun 28 2001 - 15:11:07 BST