Hunter Goatley

I’ve formatted and posted the first four (of twelve) articles in my VAX Professional series “MACRO Made Easy,” which is an introduction to programming in MACRO-32, the VAX assembly language (and Alpha and Itanium compiler).

I’ll post the rest of the articles over the coming few weeks.

MACRO Made Easy

From 1986 through 1994, I wrote thirty-six articles for VAX Professional (later Digital Systems Journal), a technical journal for OpenVMS programmers and managers. My first article was published while I was still a student at Western Kentucky University. It was quite a thrill!

During that eight-year period, I wrote a dozen articles about programming in MACRO-32, the VAX assembly language. At one time, that was my preferred programming language. I still do a little MACRO-32 work, but it hasn’t been my “go to” language for many years.

The last seven articles I wrote were co-authored with Ed Heinrich. We had pitched a book idea about OpenVMS Systems Programming to DEC Press, but for various reasons, the book never happened. The project started as a day-long seminar we presented at DECUS Symposia a couple of times. Once the book fell through, we decided to turn our seminar into a series of Digital Systems Journal articles.

I’ve posted the articles here. Though they were written when the Alpha was new, the ideas presented in them are largely still useful techniques for systems programming under OpenVMS.

Writing OpenVMS Privileged Code