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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: 0, Troll) by realDonaldTrump on Monday June 17 2019, @02:54AM
And, another Anti U.S.A. Hate Fest. Trying to make U.S.A. look bad. And make our foe the E.U.( U.K.) look good. By saying things about Microsoft that, possibly, aren't even true. Whatever happened to, Submissions Guideline? It says, "be neutral and factual." Canopic Jug is never neutral. And many times, not factual. Look at the "story" they put up the other day. TOTALLY MADE UP, they call it "satirical." And they call it, pseudonymous. Fancy way of saying, it's lies and the person that wrote them won't put his real name.
And this one, where is the article? They make it look like there was an article, like they left things out of an article. And put in the dots, right? They always say, "oh Donald, you didn't put a Link, you're so horrible." And they put so many Links in this one. And, I opened so many Links. All the Links. But, I don't see the article. There's NO LINK to the article. And possibly there is no article. So Fake!!!!