On Saturday 19 July 2003 11:08 am, Anne Wilson wrote: > On Saturday 19 Jul 2003 3:46 pm, Carroll Grigsby wrote: > > On Saturday 19 July 2003 10:01 am, JoeHill wrote: > > > On Fri, 18 Jul 2003 16:31:09 +0100 > > > > > > Inhabitant of Zion <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> uttered: > > > > You guys should really read this its outragious - if its true! > > > > > > and guess who started all this shite... > > > > > > no, take a wild guess... > > > > > > ok, here: > > > > > > http://www.linuxmafia.com/~rick/linux-info/open-letter-to-hobbyis > > >ts.html > > > > > > :) > > > > Wow, APL! I'd forgotten all about that one. I never learned the > > language myself, but I had a buddy that did. It turned him into a > > genuine fanatic -- worse than the Hare Krishna kids in airports. It > > also made a lot of money for him developing software for > > programming NC machines that would run on the original IBM 5100 > > desktop computer (circa 1975). He's still doing that part time. > > -- cmg > > I can't take this seriously. It was late '70s before Microsoft Basic > was around, IIRC, and such 'hobbyist' machines as were around were > not only expensive, but had the operating system embedded - and it > was into the '80's before it became anything like standard. If you > were not building your box - and how many were at that time? - why > would you 'steal' the operating system? > > Anne
Anne: Actually, there was a market for MS Basic and similar software in the early days. Gates didn't get into the operating system business until IBM showed up on his front step with a blank purchase order in hand. His Basic was used on a both CP/M and non-CP/M machines. The latter computers usually had cassette interfaces -- the most famous being the Radio Shack TRS80 -- but some had floppies, too. IIRC, the base model TRS80 came with a simple Basic in ROM, but there was also an extended version that was loaded from cassettes. (You had to have 16K RAM to do that. Cost about $150 or so.) Liberating software for your buddies was tricky since there were virtually no standards; each manufacturer came up with his own nifty format which was supposed to make the disks (or tapes) inaccessable to any other hardware. -- cmg
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