History
The earliest versions of MASM date back to 1981.
Up to version 5.0, MASM was available as an MS-DOS application only. Versions 5.1 and 6.0 were available as both MS-DOS and OS/2 applications.
Version 6.0, released in 1992, added high-level programming support and a more C-like syntax. By the end of the year, version 6.1A updated the memory management to be compatible with code produced by Visual C++. In 1993 full support for 32-bit applications and the Pentium instruction set was added. The MASM binary at that time was shipped as a "bi-modal" DOS-extended binary (using the Phar Lap TNT DOS extender).
Versions 6.12 to 6.14 were implemented as patches for version 6.11. These patches changed the type of the binary to native PE format; version 6.11 is the last version of MASM that will run under MS-DOS.
By the end of 1997 MASM fully supported Windows 95 and included some AMD-specific instructions.
In 1999 Intel released macros for SIMD and MMX instructions, which were shortly after supported natively by MASM. With the 6.15 release in 2000, Microsoft discontinued support for MASM as a separate product, instead subsuming it into the Visual Studio toolset. Though it was still compatible with Windows 98, current versions of Visual Studio were not. Support for 64-bit processors was not added until the release of Visual Studio 2005, with MASM 8.0.
Read more about this topic: Microsoft Macro Assembler
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