Talk:Simons' BASIC

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Versions

There must have been several versions of the cartridge. In the image in the article one can clearly read "SIMONS' BASIC", but I'm looking now at the cartridge I bought (in Sweden, autumn 1984), and it says "SIMON'S BASIC". Drhex (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 17:57, 5 November 2009 (UTC).[reply]

Entry into the public domain?

Are there any countries around the world where Simons' BASIC became public domain?

Did the author ever give it away to the public? Dexter Nextnumber (talk) 08:41, 23 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

David Simons

Some people found him. Quote excerpts:

After Simon's basic I went to university and studied computing and economics. From there I joined SCO (Santa Cruz Operation) and worked on their Unix kernel which was something I always wanted to do. I then joined a startup which unfortunately didn't make it but had a lot of fun (implementing an open source J2EE app server). I've since worked for a number of other companies including Sun and I now work for the leading virtualization company.

I'll try to answer the questions that I see below....

The deal was royalty based.
As a DLH mentions, there was a Simon's Basic2 that was released by Commodore (at least in the UK and I believe the US) - it used a neat trick to page use some of the memory which was rendered inaccessible by the original cartridge. After the 64 I did a 'SAM BASIC' for the Amiga which was a complete basic interpreter from scatch though it partially compiled the code and also had a mechanism for loading (dynamically) extensions. Sam basic could use symbols, though it did still have line numbers.
I'm not really sure I could document my time writing SB - it was such a long time ago!

I got into writing basic extensions because it was a great way of using assembler (which is really liked doing) to build something practical. Once I started adding commands, new ones kept coming to mind and there were a few that Commodore asked for as well. The thing that was so enjoyable about it was that it took you deep into the internals of the system both from a hardware perspective but also trying to find entry points and routines in the standard basic that could be piggy backed on.

--grin ✎ 13:30, 10 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Incorrect.

Article states:

"This product is widely, but incorrectly, called "Simon's BASIC", because of confusion between the first name "Simon" and the surname "Simons"."

The product also appears to be incorrectly called "Simons' Basic"

Since I assume that there was only ever one of him, then the correct name should be "Simons's Basic".

109.156.49.202 (talk) 15:05, 27 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

You are, of course, entirely correct. However, the product was sold as "Simons' Basic" because it was sold by an American company. Unfortunately, the Americans are too lazy to learn the correct use of the apostrophe. 212.183.140.54 (talk) 15:21, 27 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]