 Notice. New forum software under development. It's going to miss a few functions and look a bit ugly for a while, but I'm working on it full time now as the old forum was too unstable. Couple days, all good. If you notice any issues, please contact me. |
Forum Index : Microcontroller and PC projects : Retro books and magazines
| Author | Message | ||||
elk1984 Senior Member  Joined: 11/07/2020 Location: United KingdomPosts: 228 |
There's a wealth of books and magazines from the 80's where basic was taught and could be useful inspiration for familiarisation with the Maximite family (I'm thinking in particular of a 52 week partwork for those in the UK). In some cases materials are widely shared even linked from Wikipedia. What's the general view of reusing projects (not full articles or line for line code as it would be incompatible) to create resources for the Maximite? |
||||
| darthvader Regular Member  Joined: 31/01/2020 Location: FrancePosts: 87 |
Here in France i use this one to get oldies  abandonware magazines Cheers. Theory is when we know everything but nothing work ... Practice is when everything work but no one know why ;) |
||||
Womble Senior Member Joined: 09/07/2020 Location: United KingdomPosts: 267 |
Seeking ideas and inspiration from published articles from out of print or abandoned sources is probably something many of us do (to avoid reinventing the wheel qv.) I certainly subscribed to William Yu's All Basic Code (ABC packets) a Massive collection of public-domain code for various BASIC interpreters/compilers published on the fledgling internet between 1995 and 2003 as FreeWare. I also have a fairly extensive library of programming books and magazines, most of which would now be considered "retro", into which I dip for inspiration. The problem is that many of these resources predate such things as the GPL or other "free software licence" and whilst many have comment headers permiting use so long as credit is given to the authors the contact details are likely to be so obsolete that explicit permission can no longer be sought from either the publisher or author. I personally try to give credit where possible, and usually add a url link to show where I obtained any code snippet or inspirational article or idea (even when its for my own personal use)... which is only polite, even with probable abandonware. Plagiarism however is to be avoided. Particularly as I and many others who post here did or still do make a living from writing software, some of it even in Basic. You never know whose toes you might tread on. I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that if you port some code from one language (or dialect) to another it is a derivative work and inherits whatever licence it was originally published under. This means that it is still owned by the original author or publisher. Also, under the forum guidelines: Probably best to ask first on a case by case basis before posting any actual code you are unsure of, and give credit where credit is due if you seek inspiration from a published article. |
||||
thwill Guru  Joined: 16/09/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 4311 |
Agree with everything Womble said. I'm not sure it changes the conversation, but it may also be the case that code published in early "consumer" computer magazines and books probably has antecedents in earlier work that it fails to credit ... usually it seems from Bell Labs or one of the "usual suspects" American Universities; I'm sure the same goes for Universities in other countries, but its always the American ones that seem to be better at trumpeting their contribution. Best wishes, Tom MMBasic for Linux, Game*Mite, CMM2 Welcome Tape, Creaky old text adventures |
||||
| lizby Guru Joined: 17/05/2016 Location: United StatesPosts: 3378 |
We all stand on the shoulders of giants. In one job I made changes to a (U.S.) Library of Congress database set of programs--tens of thousands of lines of IBM assembler code where the only comment you would be likely to find would be along the lines of a comment at the head of a several-hundred-line subroutine like: "This implements so-and-so's such-and-such algorithm from the ACM [Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery], Vol x, Pg y". Some years later from memory of the database structure and functional behavior, I rewrote parts in Z80 assembly language and later C. Was this plagiarism? Was the code in the public domain anyway (if unpublished) because developed by a (civilian) government agency? I couldn't possibly attribute every coding trick I've appropriated over 50 years of learning to code. This is not to justify wholesale appropriation, especially of commercial products, but there are a lot of gray areas, and I'm sure that behind the scenes many commercial products use code that did not spring purely from the brain of the coder. That said, I applaud thwill's efforts to provide a clean Welcome Tape experience to the CMM2 community. PicoMite, Armmite F4, SensorKits, MMBasic Hardware, Games, etc. on fruitoftheshed |
||||
 Print this page |
 |
The Back Shed's forum code is written, and hosted, in Australia. | © JAQ Software 2025 |
