Daniel Robbins hired by M$

[James Knott]

Henry Spencer wrote:
> On Tue, 14 Jun 2005, James Knott wrote:
>>...Also, at that time BASIC was a teaching language and
>>the source would have been available to students.
> 
> Yes and no and maybe.  Just because a particular BASIC implementation was
> meant to be used for teaching (and there was non-teaching use of BASIC
> even then) doesn't mean that its source code was available at all, never
> mind to students.  Plenty of teaching-oriented language implementations
> were shipped binary-only.
> 
>>...Back in those days, source code was routinely made available.
> 
> Sometimes, and sometimes not.

Back in the mid '70s, I bought a few packages, including a BASIC
interpreter, for my IMSAI 8080.  Every one of them came with printed
source code, though source on paper tape was an extra cost option.  The
mini-computers at work also came with a lot of source code.  In fact, to
initially load that BASIC into my system, I had to manually toggle it in
via the front panel (in binary), and then save to cassette!  A large
portion of the manual was fully commented source code, complete with
object code in octal or hex.

Incidentally, when I was entering all that code, I was working up in
Armstrong Ont., for a month, so I had plenty of time to kill after work.
 ;-)

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