Macros actually saw a great deal of use in the assembly-language space for as long as people were writing large programs directly in assembly. (Typically, the assemblers would let you define "pseudo-operations" which could appear in place of an actual opcode, and whose arguments were used to fill in templates.) In fact, one of the raps on Unix among "big iron" programmers was that its assembler was so primitive --- meaning, in particular, that it had no useful macro facilities.