asm-86

[felipe]

I have been reading old code written in intel asm-86 and it's amazing how similar is from masm syntax, specially old masm (you know actually masm and not ml). So i guess microsoft purchased the intel assembler, as it did with DOS, and then of course made changes, improvements, etc. 
What do you think about it, or do you think microsoft did mams from scratch using the same syntax for instructions and directives for compatibility reasons? 

[hutch--]

Probably the latter as Microsoft have been maintaining MASM since the early 1980s. I have copies of almost every version and none of the very early ones would run on any recent operating system, the earliest ones probably would not run on MS-DOS 5.0.