To be completely truthful, they compared binary dumps of hand-assembled, and machine-assembled software, to ensure that everything was exactly the same. But yes, they hand-assembled some weird instruction set. I can't recall asking if they assembled to ASCII hexadecimal word (24-bit) representations, or to something else.

I believe this was for "Commerical Titan", a short-lived, Titan 34D variant. Four flights, one of which left Intelsat VI in the wrong orbit. That wasn't software, but plugging the wrong cable in.