Anybody good at disassembly????

From: Douglas Quebbeman <dhquebbeman_at_theestopinalgroup.com>
Date: Thu Jun 28 16:00:53 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.

People still *are* able to look at octal dumps; but since my arms got
shorter, all the numbers blend together.

So, since I don't think my arms will get longer any time soon,
I wrote a dissassembler. Using an unfinished simulator that
handles the instruction decoding and welding it into a dump
utility that translates from the CDC 60-bit words of Display
Code (6-bit character set) gave me a useful disassembler.

Technically, it's not a disassembler, rather, it's just an
opcode dump. I need to add a scripting ability that I can use
to specify data areas that should not get tramslated into opcodes.

Funny thing, when I first started doing this 25 years ago,
I did just take an octal dump and disassemble it by hand.

Regards,
-doug q
Received on Thu Jun 28 2001 - 16:00:53 BST