Copyright violations bring Forth memories

Last week I found a couple of copyright violations. Am I upset? Not at all - actually I'm delighted that stuff I did in 1983 is alive and well on the Interweb thanks to the efforts of others.

The first is an online readable copy of my 1983 book The Complete Forth. It's a textbook on the programming language Forth that I was heavily into at the time. The book was first published by Sigma Press, then internationally by John Wiley, and was translated into both Dutch and Japanese. Someone - I assume from the Jupiter Ace archive - has gone to the trouble of scanning every page. Even the pull out reference card. Whoever you are, thank you.

Just before I wrote that book, I had developed a Forth programming system (a programming environment that integrates compiler and interpreter) for the NASCOM 2 Z80 micro computer. Myself and a friend then marketed Hull-Forth and, I recall, sold several hundred copies. Of course this was pre-internet so marketing meant small ads in the magazine Personal Computer World. What we actually shipped was a printed manual together with the code on a cassette tape. Floppy disks were hugely expensive and beyond the reach of hobby computers, so for saving and loading programs we used audio cassette recorders. They were slow and very unreliable; if there was a checksum error you just had to rewind, cross your fingers and try again. I can't imagine anyone feeling nostalgic for that particular technology.

This brings me to the second copyright infringement. By accident I discovered there is a webpage for NASCOM enthusiasts, and several emulators, so you can run a virtual NASCOM on your modern PC. Scrolling down the long list of software in the NASCOM repository, in the section Programming Languages, I find

• Hull Forth Interpreter/Compiler (1982)

Hah! Someone must have gone to alot of trouble to get the code from the original cassette*, recorded using the Kansas City Standard at, I think, 300 baud (so slow you could almost hear the noughts and ones!), to a .NAS file you can download into your NASCOM emulator.

Ok, now to get that NASCOM emulator running. It will be fun (and slightly absurd) to run Hull Forth again for the first time in about 33 years.

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*I probably still have one of those cassettes in my loft**, but no way of reading the data from it.
**Along with stacks of punched cards, rolls of paper tape, and all kinds floppy disks.