[NelsonMinar]

It's worth putting this book in historical context. It was first published in 1986. Numerical programming like this was very much a black art and the book was an well researched, documented, usable set of algorithms with (mostly) working code. Open source code was a very new idea (FSF was only established a year before, and while there are earlier precedents like BSD source it was all very new.) Source code distributions were awkward; absolutely nothing like github of course, just a few FTP servers which maybe you could get code from if you knew they existed and had Internet access. Typing in code from a book seemed perfectly reasonable.

[kragen]

Open source code was a very new idea, perhaps going back no further than the first SHARE meeting 31 years earlier in 01955, but imposing legal restrictions on source code distribution was an even newer idea.

(But what about open-source numerical methods? Well, EISPACK had been published in 01974, 12 years before NR came out.)

Typing in code from a book was perfectly reasonable.

The issue today, though, is not what restrictions the book's copyright holders imposed, or purported to impose, in 01986. The issue is the restrictions they impose today.

[Aardwolf]

> 01974

People from the year 100000 might be offended by this notation. But in seriousness, what is the extra 0 for? Even without it, 1974 and 10000 are perfectly distinguishable, and for computers good methods to store long dates use binary storage formats, so amount of ASCII decimal digits doesn't matter there

[sitkack]

It is for Y10k compliance, https://longnow.org/ideas/02013/12/31/long-now-years-five-di...

[gnufx]

To support the sibling: If we're talking history, the assumption in the early 80s was that software was shared, at least in the technical computing circles I lived in and to the extent it was portable enough. We were suspicious of people who kept code under wraps -- with good reason in some cases that dubiously reproduced data post hoc, which was an early lesson. Free Software per se was a reaction to that culture being eroded around rms earlier than I saw it, and it's basically what I've done since I started.

I'm not convinced about "black art" given, for instance, the Harwell library and later NAG, although they weren't free software. (I knew about Ian Grant's work as an undergraduate, though he didn't teach me.) Later I knew how to get code from Netlib by email before we had general trans-Atlantic network access.

I found Nick Higham has a soft spot for the undergraduate textbook we had, from rather earlier, Acton's Numerical Methods that Work.

[B1FF_PSUVM]

> Source code distributions were awkward;

Tapes by mail was a thing ...