Date: Sun, 01 Jul 2001 16:07:31 -0600 From: Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com> To: Technical Information <tech_info@threespace.com> Cc: FreeBSD Advocacy <advocacy@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: BSD, .Net comments - any reponse to this reasoning? Message-ID: <3B3F9F23.FF02A317@softweyr.com> References: <20010630235936.A90173@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org> <4.3.2.7.2.20010701060843.017bfee8@threespace.com>
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Chip Morton blathered:
>
> At 03:48 AM 7/1/2001, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> >The one thing in that letter that I thought was interesting is the
> >reference to _stealing_ BASIC, I haven't seen that one before.
Is this the story relating how Bill Gates stole the BASIC interpreter
from Dartmouth University to create the original Microsoft BASIC?
It's true, sort of, but what the license on the original BASIC code
was. It was well accepted at the time that Microsoft BASIC was what
we'd now call a "port" of the original PDP-11 (IIRC) BASIC interpreter
to run on the 8080.
> >That should have got your warning flag set because when Microsoft
> >was releasing BASIC for the PC, (and S-100 CP/M I believe) the code
BASIC for the PC came LONG after the original BASIC-80, which ran on
bare machines, CPM, and TRS-DOS. Microsoft later supplied BASIC
interpreters for other CPUs, including the 6502 on the Apple ][ and
later Commodore machines and the 6809 on the Radio Shack Color
Computer. I think they wrote the cartridge basic for the TI-99 also,
but I'm not certain of that.
> >for that was all handwritten assembly language. If he had
> >developers that did get a public domain assembly language version
> >of BASIC they would have had to extensively modify it for whatever
> >computer they wanted to run it on, and in the S-100 days there
> >wasn't a "standard" for a computer like we understand the PC
> >Standard of today, so this claim of stealing BASIC is pretty much
> >bogus.
It's not at all bogus, Bill Gates threw an (in)famous fit at a bunch
of computer users at an early user group meeting, claiming people were
stealing his code. At the time, I doubt many of them thought they
were stealing, since everyone else involved with little computers
shared their code openly.
> >(IBM as many other computer manufacturers, like Commodore,
> >also released BASIC rom code and there wasn't any attribution to
> >Microsoft in it)
IBM didn't because their size allowed them to negotiate away the
Microsoft name in those days. You saw no mention of Microsoft in any
of the PC-DOS code or prompts, either, but it was still the same as
QDOS, er, MS-DOS.
> Actually, the BASIC used on the Commodore 64 and VIC-20 was licensed from
> Microsoft. It said so in the startup screen.
The C-64 and VIC-20 came very late in the life of Commodore. The PET
and CBM machines had a basic interpreter that was unrelated to
Microsoft.
> This was perhaps the first
> time I'd ever heard of Microsoft. But my understanding is that it was
> ported to many different microcomputers. There wasn't such an effort to
> "lock" users into one platform since Microsoft hadn't yet established a
> presence of it's own.
To do so would have made no sense, since Microsoft didn't yet have a
platform to lock people onto. Life was more complicated, and yet so
much better, in those days.
--
"Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?"
Wes Peters Softweyr LLC
wes@softweyr.com http://softweyr.com/
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