Ancient 6502 FOCAL source code

From: Richard Erlacher <edick_at_idcomm.com>
Date: Sun Sep 30 09:44:25 2001

There's a little information that might help shed light on this matter in the
"history" written by Larry Fish on www.6502group.org if you care to read it.
I've been uninvolved in the activities of this venerable group for over a
decade, thouth I've maintained contact with certain individuals and thereby kept
aware of the activities.

Their website, so far, does not contain any links to any of this old software,
and, at the moment nobody knows where it's stored. Nobody seems to care enough
to find out about it, so I've been going around p*ssing people off by asking
what happened to the files that Larry Fish provided for the purpose of putting
it on the site. He has, of course, cleared it off his own site, since it is of
limited interest by now. It's possible that through the lack of interest of
some, and the lack of consideration of some others, this fairly significant work
product of the '70's may be lost to the general public.

There are, IIRC, a very few copies of of the pre-APEX software still in
existence on microfiche, though I don't personally own them, and there are a few
copies on listings, of which I had all, have most, though not all are in useable
condition.

The output of this very active group in the '70's, which was when I was actively
involved, seemed to stop abruptly in about1981, by which time the key players,
i.e. Wall, Fish, Boyle, and Blaney, all had Apple]['s. So long as there was one
or more of these fellows using their old Digital Group boxes, they were busy
making tools to support that architecture and that took up a large share of
their time. By the time they had their Apple]['s, they no longer generated code
that wouldn't run on the Apple][, so that meant everything had to be
Apple][-compatible, and the rise of APEX made the boundary between the Apple][
and the Digital Group systems disappear. Once they were able to share their
work product reliably (as reliably as Apple][ diskettes would allow) they were
able to interact in smaller groups and the need for discussions and projects in
the context of the larger group were no longer beneficial, though they were
entertaining. This meant that they were all able to do their work without the
general involvement of the group at large, so that's when new software stopped
flowing from the fountain.

AFAIK, there was nothing ever done in the 6502group that involved the various
products from Commodore, Synertek, or Rockwell, with the exception of the few
things done early-on to support one or two group members' KIMs, and that stopped
once the interest in FDD's began to increase.

Dick

----- Original Message -----
From: "Iggy Drougge" <optimus_at_canit.se>
To: "Richard Erlacher" <classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org>
Sent: Saturday, September 29, 2001 7:00 AM
Subject: Re: Ancient 6502 FOCAL source code


> Richard Erlacher skrev:
>
> >I've got the machine readable FOCAL source file available now. It's in 6502
> >Assembly Language, PAL65 syntax, which will make DEC-users comfortable and
> >the rest of us cringe, but that's what available.
>
> Why, what's PAL65?
>
> --
> En ligne avec Thor 2.6a.
>
>
Received on Sun Sep 30 2001 - 09:44:25 BST