Re: Richard Stallman as Seen via the BBS Scene

On 2023-02-16, John Levine <[email protected]> wrote:

> According to Vir Campestris  <[email protected]>:
>
>> On 16/02/2023 02:33, John Levine wrote:
>>
>>> As anyone familiar
>>> with the history of computing knows, nobody even attempted to
>>> copyright software until the mid 1960s, and the computer business
>>> did just fine in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s.
>>
>> Back in those days there was no portable software.
>
> Um, the entire point of COBOL was to be portable, and people were
> certainly moving Fortran programs from one kind of machine to another
> by 1960. You might want to brush up on your history.
>
> Hint: the CO stands for COmmon.

Still, as with everything else, IBM did its best to add proprietary
extensions to lock people in.  (Yes, that's one more "innovation"
that Microsoft didn't invent.)  But if you were careful you could
write in a fairly portable dialect.

-- 
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