EPROM issues, who can burn? - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

31 Oct 1999

The reality of this quandary is that the answer lies not in the legality of
copying the EPROMs, but in the likelihood of getting caught.  Now, an EPROM
burner for 2716's is DIRT SIMPLE to make, and the same goes for most of the
28-pin parts, and I might guess it's true of the 32-pin parts as well.  The
1702's, 2708's, and others of that ilk (mainly due to the multiple power
supplies) might cause minor problems.  Those however, can be dealt with in a
number of creative ways.

1) if the goal is to have an "authentic" system, one has to have the
authentic EPROMs with the binary images in them.  The spec's for programming
pre-32-pin eproms were not kept secret.

2) if the goal is simply to have a working system, there are several ways to
get around the ancient EPROM oddities.  All of these involve wiring and
maybe even soldering something.  The easiest of them, however, is to build
an adapter board with the binary images residing in battery backed rams
intended for substitution for EPROMs, and a simple programmer for them for
those situations when things go wrong.

3) Now comes the hard part . . . You have to choose.

Dick
-----Original Message-----
From: Tony Duell &lt;ard(a)p850ug1.demon.co.uk&gt;
To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
&lt;classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu&gt;
Date: Sunday, October 31, 1999 5:28 PM
Subject: Re: EPROM issues, who can burn?

...
 > > Ahhhhh... now THAT might get me around the
copyright issues! Set it up
> > such that only the folks who own equipment that can use the images can
get
...
    to it... 
 Well, certainly those folks would be entitled to a copy of what they
 have already, and it shouldn't be of much value to others. 
The time when that's not strictly true is when machines came with
optional EPROMs...

The classic case is the BBC micro. It has 4 (IIRC) 'sideways ROM
sockets', one of which is normally filled by the BASIC ROM, and there are
add-on cards to provide more such sockets.

Various companies (Acorn and others) sold software (disk filing systems
-- like DOSes, languages, applications, etc) in EPROMs to go into these
sockets. And while all BBC owners will have had the Acorn MOS (Machine
Operating System) ROM and BBC BASIC, the same is certainly not true of
all this other software.

Practically, I suspect that a lot of this software is of little
commercial value today, but it is still copyrighted, and can't be just
stuck on a web site.

-tony