MMOON.ES@PARC-MAXC.ARPA (01/12/84)
I would dearly like to see BIOS information put out in the public domain. While different hardware manufacturers have every right to copyright their particular code, I see no reason not to exchange ideas on the generalized techniques involved in a particular subroutine or task without the gory details of a peculiar implimentation. If the idea is one's own, of course the publishing of source code is a personal decision. It may be more appropriate to put the technique down in some form of pseudo-code since, CP/M is no longer tied to a small group of code-compatible processors. I feel this list is an appropriate forum, but would certainly add myself to any other on which the discussion took place. I will suggest a few topics I would like to see and participate in discussions on: 1)Interrupt drivers for anything, but particularly floppy controllers 2)Pointer interfaces, e. g., mice, touchpads, etc. 3)Bdos call trapping 4)Any public-domain LRU or other buffering techniques for flavors of CP/M which don't already employ the same Having a pool of techniques for even the more mundane and necessary stuff needed for baseline systems would be incredibly useful for those of us with the unstoppable urge to hack hardware, not to mention the poor people who can't get their manufacturer to supply BIOS source. I'll be watching this develop. MMoon.es