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from the digital-archeology-now-before-its-too-late dept.
Programmer David Given has done the leg work to contact and ask R. T. Russel about releasing the Z80-based BBC BASIC as Free Software. It is now available under the non-reciprocal zlib license:
As part of the work I've been doing with cpmish I've been trying to track down the copyright holders of some of the more classic pieces of CP/M software and asking them to license it in a way that allows redistribution. One of the people I contacted was R.T. Russell, the author of the classic Z80 BBC BASIC, and he very kindly sent me the source and agreed to allow it to be distributed under the terms of the zlib license. So it's now open source!
[...] So the reason why this is important is that BASIC has, rightly, a reputation for being a pretty terrible language; but BBC BASIC was a dialect specifically commissioned by the BBC in 1981 as an educational aid. As a result, BBC BASIC supports named procedures, local variables, recursion, and other structured programming features. Unlike Microsoft BASIC, you can write proper structured, maintainable programs in BBC BASIC without needing to refer to any line numbers anywhere. And it'll run faster that way: [...]
[...] The original version was written by Sophie Wilson at Acorn in 1981 for their 6502-based range of BBC Micro computers and during the early eighties every school child in the United Kingdom was exposed to it, spawning a whole generation of bedroom programmers.
Earlier on SN:
[Ed's Comment: 170619-0724UTC. Added additional link to the original story]
(Score: 3, Informative) by choose another one on Monday June 17 2019, @03:35PM
The fun thing about the paged / sideways ROMs was that there were spare ROM slots (3?) on the mother board and you could buy software on ROM. Before floppy disks became common a lot of more "serious" BBC micro software actually came that way. You _could_ copy it, but it was more expensive to buy 16K EEPROMs to copy it onto than it was to just buy new ROMs.
Having your software in ROM was seriously cool because it left you tons and tons of data memory to play with (nearly 32K!), so much memory you could do _anything_.... Tricky bit was that you couldn't write BASIC software to run from ROM, because the BASIC ROM would be swapped out, so you had to do it all in assembler or cross-compile from serious (then) hardware.