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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: 2) by theluggage on Thursday June 20 2019, @08:33PM
For some bizarre reason, Acorn decided that, because CP/M was for business, the Z80 processor needed to come with a complete business software suite 'worth' about £1000, including a wp/spreadsheet/database that you'd never heard of, an application generator (remember 'The Last One'? It wasn't that...) and the CIS COBOL compiler (which on its own retailed for over £400). I'm sure they licensed it at a fraction of retail price, but I doubt it was free (software was really expensive in those days). Of course, what people really wanted CP/M for was to run those copies of Wordstar and DBase 2 which they'd... acquired...
There was a somewhat cheaper 6502 second processor too, with a clean 64K memory map and a souped-up 6502 running at something sick like 4MHz - now that was the fastest thing on 8 bits at the time (Best. Implementation. Ever. of Elite :-) )