[Coco] [Color Computer] Re: mikeyterm

[wdg3rd at comcast.net]

From: shadow at shadowgard.com
> On 18 Sep 2008 at 4:24, Mike Ortloff wrote:
> 
> > Then somebody warn RTSI & Dennis Bathory-Kitsz, I'd sure hate to see these
> > long-time CoCo resources (& in DBKs case, 30-years long) taken down over
> > some now-almost-useless piece of telecom ancient history.
>  
> > There are HUNDREDS of files up on the respective sites, =somebody=
> > authorized the archiving, else these folks would be exposed to serious
> > litigation.
> 
> The copyright owner has to know and decide to file suit. 
> 
> With a lot of older pieces of software, the current copyright owners 
> don't even *know* that they own the rights. They've acquired them 
> thru a chain of buyouts. I think a lot of Tandy's Z-80 based stuff 
> went thru something like 5 different companies before folks lost 
> track.

Tandy sold off all of their computer properties to AST.  That includes 6809 as well as Z-80 and 68000.  AST was bought by Samsung and to the best of anybody's knowledge that has not been sold on, merely the 8-bit stuff is just laying there like a raped kitten, ignored. There seems to be some vagueness in the copyright when corporate properties are sold to a foreign entity (Samsung being in Korea).  I doubt anybody at Samsung is even aware of the existence of most of the Tandy software they technically own.

There was a previous sale of the rights to the Scripsit for Unix codebase (Scripsit-16, Scripsit 1000/2000, Scripsit-PC) to a party who won't admit to knowing where the disks are.  (The six or so other products called Scripsit, unrelated to that or each other, including Color Scripsit in ROM or on disk or for OS-9, are Samsung properties).  (I don't know of any recent lawsuits concerning intellectual property _by_ Samsung, they seem to get sued all the time for infringements of patents by other folks so they might not have the spare lawyers a US company a tenth the size would have).

Things called Scripsit (BTW, that's Latin for "it is written") that I recall:

Cassette Scripsit (Mod 1/3), Disk Scripsit (same product, I/O changed)

SuperScripsit (Mod 1/3/4)

Model 2 Scripsit (which Isaac Asimov used for his last 150 or so books) (several versions)

Personal Scripsit (for MS-DOS).

Color Scripsit (cartridge and disk)

Scripsit-16 (Xenix) later backported to MS-DOS as Scripsit 1000/2000 and Scripsit/PC (this is the specific item I mentioned above, John Esak bought it and ported it for the NCR Tower and other Unix boxes, declined my offer to help port it to a couple of other machines, and is being a dog in the manger about porting it to Linux).  (He lost money in the operation, never recovered his costs as to the best of my knowledge nobody ever bought the product for a "big" Unix system.

OS-9 Scripsit (was in the catalog, but I never saw a copy, could be based on any codebase above or totally unrelated), I had left the firm and was then just involved in Xenix/Unix

Scripsit-100 (actually just an output formatter for the ROM text editor, insert directives into the text file first)

To the best of my knowledge, there was never a product called Scripsit for the MC-10 or any of the Pocket Computers (which were at least three separate product series' themselves).  But none of those are machines had keyboards suitable for actually typing anyway, as bad as than an early PET or a modern PDA or cell phone)
--
Ward Griffiths    wdg3rd at comcast.net

"What I know [about the art of the sword] boils down to this:  If you see a guy running at you with a sword, put two rounds in his chest to slow him down, then one into his brain to finish him off".  Aaron Allston, _Sidhe Devil_