On Fri, 21 Feb 2025 19:59:25 +0100
Florian Weimer <[email protected]> wrote:
> * James K. Lowden:
>
> > As I mentioned in other posts, IMO (IANAL) the copyright in
> > unimportant and probably unenforceable. The National Computing
> > Centre no longer exists, and the document was also published by NIST
> > which, as part of the US government, does not copyright its
> > publications.
>
> In the United States. It is generally assumed that the
> U.S. government can claim copyright on its works abroad.
It may be useful to know the text can be freely retrieved. If one is patient
with a recalcitrant system. My copy is not samizdat.
Go to:
https://ntrl.ntis.gov/NTRL/
Under "Date Published" at the left edge of the screen,
Enter: 1980
as the start date. You don't want the 1974 version.
Under "Advanced Search" at the left edge of the screen,
Enter: CCVS 85
Check: Only documents with full text
Press: Search
It takes a moment. Under "Search Results" in the middle of the screen,
Enter: cobol
to the left of the Filter Results button
Press : Filter Results
In my browser, Accession Number PB93163178 is the 3rd row. You want the title
"COBOL Compiler Validation System (CCVS 85), User Guide, Version 4.2".
The "Title/Authors" column looks like dead text, and the "Download" column has
a PDF button (un)carefully wired not to work. These are what we call negative
affordances. There is a trick, though, even two tricks.
1. Simply clicking on the PDF logo usually IME yields a "server not available"
page. However, the XHTML logo downloads a page and, if you *immediately*
follow that by clicking on the PDF, you'll often get the PDF.
2. Click on the word "COBOL" in the title. It's a link. It brings me to this
URL:
https://ntrl.ntis.gov/NTRL/dashboard/searchResults/titleDetail/PB93163178.xhtml
That page looks like a library card describing an entry. It bears this
abstract:
"The report is a comprehensive user guide for the COBOL 85 Compiler
Validation System. It gives a brief description of each test program and
supplies information on running the tests and interpreting the results. The
validation system is used to validate COBOL compilers to ensure their
conformance to the Federal standard as prescribed in Federal Information
Processing Standards (FIPS) PUB 21-3 and the International Organization for
Standardization (ISO) Standard 1989:1985. It consists of approximately 300
COBOL programs, each of which contains several independent tests."
Continuing with our negative affordances, please find beneath the blue bar at
the top of the page labeled "Details", another word, "Actions", and two little
icons above the word "Download" in fine print. You may recognize (what i think
is) the red Adobe logo representing a PDF, and an XHTML logo. These are
buttons that provoke a download of CCVS/85, version 4.2, as PDF and XHTML. As
on the search page, it is sometimes necessary to awaken the PDF genie by
downloading the XHTML first. It's part of the secret handshake, I guess.
The XHTML is derived from the PDF, because modernity:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml";>
<head>
<meta name="created" content="Thu Nov 26 00:22:07 EST 2009"/>
<meta name="producer" content="Adobe Acrobat 8.14 Paper Capture Plug-in"/>
<meta name="Content-Type" content="application/pdf"/>
<title/>
</head>
There are other ways to get there, and this way requires patience. But the
fact that the document can be retrieved (and that NTRL evidently means it to be
retrieved) is perhaps worth something.
--jkl
