Wow, those names are blasts from the past! They raise some interesting questions:
1. If you could find a tape (and read it), would they still run? 2. If they did run, would you be legal using them without paying for them? 3. If not, would it matter? I.e., since the companies are gone, would anyone care? I guess the worry would be that some patent troll bought the IP and would come after you, though how they'd find you is a bit of a mystery too. It's not like stuff that old is sending out license requests on the Internet! ObAnecdote: In 1994 or so, VM Systems Group bought Microcom, the company that made the Relay/Gold terminal emulator. This was VMSG's first step in evolving from a mainframe software company to a dead^wPC software company (they sold out to NetDamage for pennies about five years later). Relay/Gold was written in a variant of x86 assembler from a long-dead company. The language itself was not compatible with other assemblers. I never worked on it, so I don't know what this means-does this suggest that, if this had been a z/Architecture assembler, the LR instruction might have been RL or something?!? Even that would lend itself to translation via an editor macro, you'd think. Anyway, it apparently wasn't convertible, so for the rest of its life (and prior to the acquisition, even), developers used bootleg copies of that assembler. Nobody was happy about it*, but we couldn't find anyone to pay! *Well, maybe our finance people. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
