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## <a id="pal-iii" name="pal3"></a>PAL-III
| **Introduced** | August 1965
| **Manual** | [PDF, 790 kB](http://www.telegraphics.com.au/doc/paliii.pdf)
| **Delivery** | paper tape
We may presume from the name that PAL-III has two predecessors. I was able to find a reference to DEC product number 5-1-S, the Program Assembly Language for the PDP-5, which the PDP-8 directly replaced in DEC's product line, being upward compatible with it. That same [PDP-5 program catalog][pc5] says that its replacement is [an early version of PAL-III][p83s]. I have not been able to find a reference to PAL-II. Perhaps it went the way of Angular 3, Winamp 4, Netscape 5, PHP 6, MySQL 7, QuickTime 8, and Windows 9.
We may presume from the name that PAL-III has two predecessors. I was able to find a reference to DEC product number 5-1-S, the Program Assembly Language for the PDP-5 in [the PDP-5 program catalog][pc5] from December 1964. That catalog also says that the replacement for PAL for the PDP-5 is [an early version of PAL-III][p83s] for the PDP-8! This is not surprising, as the PDP-8 directly replaced the PDP-5 in DEC's product line, being upward compatible with it. I have not been able to find a reference to PAL-II. Perhaps it went the way of Angular 3, Winamp 4, Netscape 5, PHP 6, MySQL 7, QuickTime 8, and Windows 9.
The introduction date is for the earliest PAL-III manual I have found, but clearly we may extend it at least back to December 1964 based on the PDP-5 program catalog document. An [early PDP-5 brochure][pdp5b] I found from March 1964 speaks of a "Symbolic Assembler" rather than PAL; is that just marketing-speak, or does PAL first date to somewhere in that range?
The introduction date is for the earliest PAL-III manual I have found, but clearly we may extend it at least back to December 1964. An [early PDP-5 brochure][pdp5b] I found from March 1964 speaks of a "Symbolic Assembler" rather than PAL; is that just marketing-speak, or does PAL first date to somewhere in that range?
The PAL-III assembler shipped on [punched paper tape](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_tape) as part of the grandiosely-named "PDP-8 Assembly System." This amounted to an assembler, an editor, a debugger, and a loader, each a separate paper tape. The programmer would first toggle the RIM loader into the PDP-8's front panel, then use that to load the BIN loader from a fifth paper tape, separate from the PDP-8 Assembly System, then run each of these tapes through the paper tape reader repeatedly — reusing the still-in-core BIN loader each time — in order to iterate his way toward a working program!
The PAL-III assembler tape required at least two passes through the tape reader in order to produce a computer-readable BIN format output tape, plus an optional third pass if you also wanted a human-readable listing on the teletype.
If you look at pictures of PDP-8 computers, you can often see a tray with narrow slots in it, each meant to hold one of these key paper tapes, as they were needed near at hand when using a paper-tape based PDP-8. There is a good picture of a blue one on the cover of the [OS/8 Handbook][os8m], 1974 ed.
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