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From: rstevew@armory.com (Richard Steven Walz)
Subject: Re: BASIC for STAMP clone
Organization: The Armory
Date: Thu, 22 Sep 1994 17:05:44 GMT
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References: <Donald.Heller.187.00105F28@jpl.nasa.gov> <Cw84MI.LH4@nntpa.cb.att.com> <CwA8ID.4sx@armory.com> <BILLW.94Sep21010350@glare.cisco.com>
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In article <BILLW.94Sep21010350@glare.cisco.com>,
William  <billw@glare.cisco.com> wrote:
>    That's right, Wally, I checked my Parallax catalog finally; the
>    effective price you pay for having your $3.75 16C56 chip programmed
>    with BASIC is about $12 just for code!! ...  Sounds like time
>    for a PD C tinyBASIC to cut them down to size!!
>
>Go ahead.  Software should be free, like air, after all...  As they said
>during the hey-days at MIT, "feel free".
>
>Personally, $12 for a single copy of a basic byte-code interpreter
>doesn't strike me as being at all unreasonable, especially considering
>that their other software tools (like the basic compiler to generate
>generate the byte codes) is available free.  After all, the price of
>the software goes down pretty rapidly "in quantity", making projects
>like the "Faux Stamp" and "counterfit stamp" feasible in the first place!
>
>The only other (commercial) software you can get for $12 these days is the
>previous version of a bad game...
>
>But then, I work for a company with "obscene" margins that had to pay
>$75k or so just to licence the stupid patents for v.42bis, and that
>didn't get us ANY code...
>
>As user-programmable tiny controllers go, the Stamp, even at $39, is
>cheaper than anything else around, and everyone complains that parallax
>is charging too much.  Bah, humbug!  Their Basic even goes beyond PD
>"tiny basic" in that it incorporates all sorts of little extras so that
>it is practical to write useful code in 256 tokens...
>
>Personally, I'd rather have a tiny-forth, anyway...
>
>BillW
-------------------------------------
I like tiny-Forth just fine too! But think a moment. We pay perhaps <$200
for a cheap language like BASIC or it's compiler to write and publish
compiled programs with it on computers and on chips many thousands and
thousands of programs, many thousands of copies, all legal. To pay $12 each
time we write a program and sell it for each of thousands of programs and
sell each a thousand times THEN no one of us can afford to actually produce
a product with the Stamp BASIC!!! None of us can afford 10^3 * 10^3 * $12
=$12,000,000 for each successful producer of devices for the use of less
than 1KB of code!!!!! If they had tried to license each use of BASCOM for
each copy of a compiled program back in 1981, nobody would ever have
compiled BASIC into .com files!!! We already have bought the damned PIC's,
now how about a PD BASIC to show Parallax that they made a bad decision
when they decided not to market the BASIC itself for home/shop OTP burning
into our own 16C56's! If it was necessary to metal mask it to make it
smaller for really small applications like the new SIP PIC, then so be it,
and they can see how many will bother to pay for that! But this is just a
trivial amount of code that they COULD more sensibly include with the
development kit, since we have the equipment to program them ourselves!
I am simply aggravated at paying that $12 differential over and over for
the same damned 1K of code! And I'm going to agitate about it till they
learn the same lessons all the uC manufacturer's make, that you sell more
hardware if you make the development software free!!!! I know that Parallax
doesn't make much if anything besides their quantity price break on these
chips, purveying them to us cheaper than Microchip does through Digikey and
others, but I wouldn't care if they tacked a buck onto the price of their
chips if they gave the code away for free!!! They would be on my "friend of
hacker's" list for all time!!! And you know it's a matter of time before
someone does it and shoots the rug out from under them! It always happens
that way with uC's software! Zilog, Intel, Motorola, etc.
-Steve Walz   rstevew@armory.com


