On PDP-11's with ODT (a minimal memory/register inspection/modification tool) this made it easy to enter short programs (like bootstraps) from memory - it was less a case of remembering the octal than it was remembering the code and doing mental translation to octal on the fly (systems without ODT, same process but you got to use the front panel rather than a terminal).
But what I got out of it was, this hardcore mf doesn't code in assembly, he codes in binary.
Lo and behold, today 'diode matrix' is on the first page. :)
Seriously though, we did, if you had money you bought this board - it wasn't as bad as you might think, the old PDPs had core which didn't lose it's contents when you powered them off, usually the bootstrap was still there
Later I got to write a boot ROM which supported 5 different drive types (4 types of floppy from 3.5" to 8" and Winchester hard drives), complete with terminal prompt, multi-unit support and interupt handler. I got it to fit into 256 words (2 256x8 PROMS) with some trickery (I still recall being out of space by one word and needing 204 for a sector read command - finally, remembering I had 102 in a register from loading the BEV vector, shifting that up one saved a load and so got it to fit).
Even a ROM is a RAM if you're determined enough!
Summary of Functionality:
• This code seems to perform a sequence of loading data from memory into registers, performing bit tests, comparisons, and conditional branching based on the results of these tests.
• It appears to be part of a loop or some repeated operation, as there are multiple backward branches that seem to control a flow of tests and memory manipulations.I'm on mobile but my guess would be an init function waiting for hardware to be ready based on the looping and bit testing, and the context of the page itself.
Don't give it that much credit. It basically gave you an answer to "what does a generic program do".