The PDP docs only had the instruction set. The boot deck that was being used would have been a custom "site" deck that in addition to booting the computer also provided information about the peripheral configuration. The program listing we had was the assembler for the site deck. We had no idea how the assembly program was assembled in to a card deck because we couldn't do it ourselves without some boot working boot deck and we didn't have an assembler or any compilers anyway. We presumed that the deck had been produced on another PDP-8 at the time our PDP-8 was installed.
