[GTALUG] For Chris: Commodore BASIC as a scripting language

[Russell Reiter]

On Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 12:01 PM James Knott via talk <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:

> I nominate Altair BASIC!  ;-)
>
> http://altairbasic.org/
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC
>

Interesting how legal jargon influenced its development. Harvard at the
time, did not have a written policy regarding authorized use of computers
for commercial purposes. They have since written one.

https://hls.harvard.edu/dept/its/its-policies/usage-policy

This gives them a measure of control over the purpose of the academic
research tools and the environment Harvard provides and protects the
resultant research from unauthorized commercial explotation.

You'd think Harvard Law school would have understood law at the time. There
is a necessary legal implication when drafting policy, like trespass to
private property. If the intent is to restrict use of private facilities,
then that activity which is not specifically listed cannot be restricted
under those writings.

When MS and MITS went to arbitration over who owned the rights to BASIC
under the purchase agreement MITS lost for not using their "best efforts"
to market the product

This situation resulted from someone having recovered the BASIC punch tape
from Gates presentation at the Homebrew hobbyists convention. They did this
because they were to have a BASIC code as part of the package they
purchased and felt they had the rights to the property.

Gates had written his famous inflamitory open letter to hobbyists.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

Losing control of that tape was probably the first identifiable securtity
flaw in an M$ product. Gates set the tone of his companies response
mechanisim in that letter and the rest is history.

Nobody likes to be called a thief and a parasite by somebody. This
situation, after Gates et. al. purloined acadamec knowledge for commercial
endeavor, was kind of "the pot calling the kettle black,"  all things
considered.


> On 2019-08-13 10:17 PM, Stewart Russell via talk wrote:
> > This is not a place of honour:.
> >
> > https://github.com/mist64/cbmbasic
> >
> > Go do some damage!
> >
> >
> >
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