From owner-freebsd-advocacy Sun Jul 1 15: 2:58 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Received: from softweyr.com (softweyr.com [208.247.99.111]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6368037B401 for ; Sun, 1 Jul 2001 15:02:54 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from wes@softweyr.com) Received: from localhost.softweyr.com ([127.0.0.1] helo=softweyr.com ident=82bfbadd66bf3fc214a6510ad46878e0) by softweyr.com with esmtp (Exim 3.16 #1) id 15GpNM-0000VH-00; Sun, 01 Jul 2001 16:07:32 -0600 Message-ID: <3B3F9F23.FF02A317@softweyr.com> Date: Sun, 01 Jul 2001 16:07:31 -0600 From: Wes Peters Organization: Softweyr LLC X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.75 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.12 i386) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Technical Information Cc: FreeBSD Advocacy Subject: Re: BSD, .Net comments - any reponse to this reasoning? References: <20010630235936.A90173@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org> <4.3.2.7.2.20010701060843.017bfee8@threespace.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message