ASSIST (the Assembler System for Student Instruction and Systems Teaching) is an IBM System/370-compatible assembler and interpreter developed in the 1970s at Penn State University by John Mashey and a group of Mashey's student assistants. Originally, ASSIST was available only to universities and was implemented at several hundred of them, but was occasionally used elsewhere. In 1998, Penn State declared that ASSIST was no longer copyrighted and that the program was freely available.