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Old 22nd March 2014
J65nko J65nko is offline
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Join Date: May 2008
Location: Budel - the Netherlands
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Re: Open source before the 1980's

In the late seventies a group of programmers led by Bill Ragsdale created a public domain version of the Forth computer language, called FIG-Forth. (Fig = Forth Interest Group). They published assembly language listings for the 6502. 6800, 68000, 8080 and Z-80 processors and documentaton that you could copy freely, as long as the copies stated that it was placed in the public domain by courtesy of the Forth Interest Group.

Because soon many different dialects of the FIG-Forth implementation emerged, there was a serious need to to standardize the language. The first standard was Forth-79 published in 1979, followed by the heavily criticized Forth-83 standard of 1983. The first ANSI standard for Forth was published in 1994.

In 1982 or 1983, I modified the existing 6502 and Apple II Fig-Forth implementation and also published it as public domain software for the Dutch Chapter of the Forth Interest Group.

The magazine Dr. Dobbs Journal also published a lot of free or open source software. Their first three issues in 1975 published a tiny-Basic interpreter. Steve Wozniak published the source code for a 16 bit emulator for the 6502 called "Sweet 16" in this magazine

All this was 10 years before that magazine published the GNU manifesto in 1985. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Dobb%27s_Journal
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