VIEW is a word processor developed by Acorn for their BBC Micro series of 6502-based computers. It was most commonly found on the BBC Master, where it was bundled on ROM alongside its companion spreadsheet, ViewSheet.
It's a basic but functional semi-WYSIWYG word processor supporting justification, tabination, page formatting with headers and footers, multiple rulers, editing of files bigger than will fit in memory (crudely), search-and-replace, word count, text styles, and so on. It also features loadable printer drivers so that it will work with a variety of printers.
This project contains a copy of the original ROM for version B3.0, a mostly-symbolified disassembly of it using ZornsLemma's py8dis, and a port of it to my own CP/M-65 operating system (which does also run on the BBC Micro, for maximum recursion).
You might want to read the manual. You're unlikely to get anywhere without it.
The disassembly is controlled by the view.py Python script, which contains
information about what symbols are defined where. (These names were made up
based on analysis of the code.) py8dis then uses this, plus the original ROM, to
emit an assembler file, view-b3.0.asm. This is then reassembled with
beebasm to produce a bit-for-bit identical
ROM image. No attempt has been made to fix the bugs.
The same process was done to produce the CP/M-65 version, using llvm-mos syntax, which was then heavily hand-edited to change the OS interface layer to work with CP/M. This is possible because VIEW was written to only use Acorn's MOS system interface, which is highly abstract and hardware-independent.
See README-CPM.md for more information on the CP/M-65 version.
VIEW was written by Mark Colton, a British software developer and racing driver, who was responsible for the development of the entire VIEW family, which was later developed into View Professional on the BBC Micro which in turn became, on the Acorn Archimedes family of computers, the Pipedream and Fireworkz combined word processor/spreadsheets. (All now open source on Github).
He was killed in a racing accident in 1995.
The decompilation is owned by me, David Given, and I hereby declare that all my work is CC0 licensed. You may contact me at dg@cowlark.com, or visit my website at http://www.cowlark.com. There may or may not be anything interesting there.
The copyright holder for VIEW is lost to time. Acornsoft was folded into Acorn Computers, whose assets were then passed around from company to company until nobody (not even the owner) knows who the owner is. That means that this code is not actually legally entitled to be here; but, on the other hand, that means you're unlikely to be sued for using it.
If anyone finds out they own this, please let me know and I'll remove it. Also, tell people who you are!