I used both the C64 version and the PC version. I didn't find the C64 very useful. Cute, yes, but not useful in a productive way for me. I liked the PC version a lot. I used the WYSIWYG word processor to do some light desktop publishing in the mid 90's... worked as well on my old 386 as did the Windows stuff did then on a fast 486 or the then-new Pentium PCs. I never wrote code for it, but as a dev I can appreciate good, tight code when I see it.
Derive could do a lot of the symbolic math that Macsyma does as a single 5 1/4" floppy (360K?) DOS app in 1988. Awkward interface but useful for grad. physics.
Back around 1991 I had a PC-clone 386SX. For you youngsters, thats a 32-bit CPU with a 16-bit (i.e. slow) data bus. I didn't have the coin to put Windows/386 or Windows 3.0 on it, but I could afford GeoWorks. It worked very well on that old machine. I kept using it after I moved on to a used 486. GeoWorks word processor was quite good for it's time. I was sad it never got much market share.
IIRC, a.com had to have code to fit entirely in a 64Kb memory segment, and had a fixed default memory map for the code, stack and data segments. This means the loader did not need to do any fancy relocation, so there were no relocation tables and a much simpler executable header structure (nearly(?) absent for a.com).
Magnavox Odyssey... I think my grandparents bought it for my family. I was pretty young (about 6) when we got it. Pong was the most fun for us, but I remember playing Haunted House with the plasic screen overlay too!
That's Save Lots Of Plankton... an overlooked advocate of single-celled oceanic life forms, brought to media attention by Michael Palin (of Monty Python fame) during an emotional Saturday Night Live monologue.
Chuck Moore, the guy that has designed the X18 and invented Forth to begin with, also designed the original version of Patriot Scientific's Ignite 1 cpu. They acquired the rights to Chuck's design and added extra things to it to make it a better Java processor. But at it's heart, it's a Forth chip.
>The only thing I am not sure about is iron, copper, and other metals deposits
I am not an planatary geologist, but it would seem that Mars has a lot of Iron. It's not rust-colored for nothing!:-)
The book _Red Mars_ assumes that the colonists can use local iron and magnesium for construction materials and that many materials can be chemically fabricated.
Don't forget that the TRS-80 Models 1 to 4 also used the Z80 and derivitives. The Model I was one of the first computers I could get some hands-on experience with. I used to play with them at the Radio Shack stores in 5th & 6th grade, and later in Junior High, I got special permission to experiment with them. Those were the days...
I just finished the first book: _Red Mars_. I liked it overall, but I found that it dragged when it described geographical (or is that "areographical"?) details of the various expeditions and travels over Mars. The politics and social engineering parts bogged down too. However, the last 100 pages or so was very dynamic and exciting! However, if you tell me that the sequels have even more politics and social engineering minutia, I'm not going to make a priority to read them.
How about a VIA C3 (Ezra) CPU and mainboard? These can run with a passive heatsink -- no fan. This can run office productivity software okay, but they are poor for FP-heavy number cruncher software. Anyway, here is a review: [realworldtech.com] -- Mike
If, as IBM purports, "this new paradigm shifts the fundamental definition of the technology age from one of computing, to one defined by data..." then maybe they should drop the "computing" part of the name. Perhaps "autonomic data access" or "autonomic data systems" or even something wackier. Feel free to make suggestions... I'm sure the slashdot crowd can come up with some winners!;-)
How about a VIA C3 (Ezra) CPU and mainboard? These can run with a passive heatsink -- no fan. I don't know if Linux distributions work well with them, but they run office productivity software okay. They are poor for FP-heavy number cruncher software. Anyway, here is a review:
http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?section=rwtl abs&AID=RWT100401013841
--
Mike
I was a CU grad. student at CU for 3 semesters ('89-'91) and worked across the hall from Dr. Weiman's lab (for Dr. Anderson). I shared an office with another grad. student who was in Weiman's group from about '91 to '92. It's exciting to see them recognized! Their low-temperature techniques were refined over several years of steady work. I second the congratulations!
--
Mike Losh
I've been very intrigued by the Cannon Cat. I have been interested in Forth for over 10 years and have read Raskin's new book, _The Humane Interface_.
I'm playing around with a Cannon Cat-style user interface in my spare time, mostly to see if I would be productive with LEAP-oriented navigation. My experiment is just some rough C++ code written with MFC for Win32. So far it displays text, does LEAP searches, and allows text insertion and deleting. It only uses one mono-spaced font, but it does word-wrapping correctly to break long lines. It does not read or write any data to disk, but I have hard-coded perhaps a thousand words from H. G. Well's _Time Machine_ a bit of other text to let me exeriment moving around and editing. It also can display text in a few different color schemes, which I intend to use for embedded macros/code sequences and other special-purpose things like HTML content someday.
Like the original Cat, I may use Forth as my macro language (probably using FICL to start with) and/or Python (more popular at this time).
I don't know how close to the Cat I can come, since I have never seen an actual one in operation. I have only read descriptions of them in magazines, web pages, Usenet, and from Jef's _Humane Interface_ book. I use the two Alt keys on an IMB keyboard as my LEAP keys, but I think I have a several differences... right now, hitting the Alt(LEAP) key a second time after a leap will leap to the next matching instance in the appropriate direction. I believe the Cat required the user to USE FRONT + LEAP to do this. I allow the left and right cursor (arrow) keys on the IBM keyboard to bump the insertion point left or right, I think the CAT used the LEAP keys to do this (when the user did not combine them with other key presses). I select a range with the F8 key, I think the CAT required the user to press both LEAP keys together to do this. I may make my experimental code more consistent with the CAT, but at a certain level it will be impossible if I still use an IBM 101-key keyboard.
Eventually, my code could become a useable stand-alone OS. But for now, that is very far off -- its more of a toy version of a toy! If I get something I think is actually useful to other people in a stable state, I may publish it under BSD or GPL. The current crop of GUI+desktop systems are getting so complex and burdomsom. I think much more productive and approacable environment can be designed around a Cannon Cat-style UI plus modest amounts of more recent features like embedded pictures, simple diagrams, gesture and pointer-based manipulation, and perhaps voice recognition.
--
Mike
It is probably true that OKAD II could be used to design an Athlon. Lots of people are doing that, and probably Chuck finds that direction uninteresting.
However, it is clearly untrue that "you could design anything Chuck's done on any CMOS CAD. OKAD is nothing special". Based on the very thermal problems you mentioned, Chuck experimented and developed a transistor model taking into account thermal characteristics of the silicon process technology that is much more accurate than the hand-waving approximations of the mainstream design tools. And OKAD II's models can be calibrated to specific silicon production processes. So it is not just a fact that OKAD II is a crippled subset of the typical CMOS CAD suites. OKAD II allows asynchronous logic designs that push a particular silicon production technology to its limits. Ordinary tools are much more conservative. In the past, Chuck's approach was risky, as evidenced by buggy prototypes. Now, OKAD II provides accurate simulations so performance and safety can be balanced by the designer.
Do you get more income from licensing your designs and related technology? From consulting? From something else? Is there much room for a "computer cowboy" in the industry?
You have said in the past (or at least implied) that portability of system and application code is not worthwhile, which flies in the face of software industry. How do you justify this position considering the popularity and success of systems and tools designed for portability such as *BSD, Linux and the GNU toolset?
Similarly, you complain that use of software libraries tend to provide solutions that are bloated, slow, and otherwise sub-optimal. Obviously, some common set of routines or primitives is required. What is, in your view, the proper level of abstraction for the core set of software routines? What do common libraries (C Standard Library, Win32 API, Qt, etc) get wrong? Are there not may application domains where programmer productivity outweighs run-time costs? Conversely, which application domains really demand the custom-fit, non-library approach?
Can you explain why Forth software tends to scale logarithmically in size as application complexity grows, as opposed to linear or exponential scaling of more mainstream development practices? As a longtime Forth follower, I understand this phenomenon to be a result of highly aggressive modularization, which you call "factoring. Can you describe how this seems to be more successful in Forth?
Charles Moore has made several 'clockless' (well, self-clocked) asynchronous CPU designs and created his own CAD tools to do it. He is able to do this by keeping his designs very small and simple... but they are quite fast. Prototype chips of one of his earlier designs are available from Ultra Technology. So far he has been backed only by small companies, probably because he is ten years or so ahead of conventional system designers.
--
Mike Losh
Slashdot Mirror
I used both the C64 version and the PC version. I didn't find the C64 very useful. Cute, yes, but not useful in a productive way for me. I liked the PC version a lot. I used the WYSIWYG word processor to do some light desktop publishing in the mid 90's... worked as well on my old 386 as did the Windows stuff did then on a fast 486 or the then-new Pentium PCs. I never wrote code for it, but as a dev I can appreciate good, tight code when I see it.
Derive could do a lot of the symbolic math that Macsyma does as a single 5 1/4" floppy (360K?) DOS app in 1988. Awkward interface but useful for grad. physics.
Yes. Yes I do.
I've been following Chuck Moore's new startup GreenArrays and their progress with much interest. I hope they can announce some major design wins soon.
Back around 1991 I had a PC-clone 386SX. For you youngsters, thats a 32-bit CPU with a 16-bit (i.e. slow) data bus. I didn't have the coin to put Windows/386 or Windows 3.0 on it, but I could afford GeoWorks. It worked very well on that old machine. I kept using it after I moved on to a used 486. GeoWorks word processor was quite good for it's time. I was sad it never got much market share.
IIRC, a .com had to have code to fit entirely in a 64Kb memory segment, and had a fixed default memory map for the code, stack and data segments. This means the loader did not need to do any fancy relocation, so there were no relocation tables and a much simpler executable header structure (nearly(?) absent for a .com).
Magnavox Odyssey... I think my grandparents bought it for my family. I was pretty young (about 6) when we got it. Pong was the most fun for us, but I remember playing Haunted House with the plasic screen overlay too!
That's Save Lots Of Plankton... an overlooked advocate of single-celled oceanic life forms, brought to media attention by Michael Palin (of Monty Python fame) during an emotional Saturday Night Live monologue.
Actually, that does not seem so funny anymore.
Jef Raskin (of MacIntosh and "The Humane Interface" fame) wrote a detailed essay about this. He seems to be a model airplane enthusiast.
Chuck Moore, the guy that has designed the X18 and invented Forth to begin with, also designed the original version of Patriot Scientific's Ignite 1 cpu. They acquired the rights to Chuck's design and added extra things to it to make it a better Java processor. But at it's heart, it's a Forth chip.
Yes! As I posted to another thread. I saw about two episodes. Pretty wacky show, IIRC.
It was out in 1978 for nine episodes. Richard Benjamin starred as the captain of a garbage-collecting space ship. No, I'm not making this up!
>The only thing I am not sure about is iron, copper, and other metals deposits
:-)
I am not an planatary geologist, but it would seem that Mars has a lot of Iron. It's not rust-colored for nothing!
The book _Red Mars_ assumes that the colonists can use local iron and magnesium for construction materials and that many materials can be chemically fabricated.
Don't forget that the TRS-80 Models 1 to 4 also used the Z80 and derivitives. The Model I was one of the first computers I could get some hands-on experience with. I used to play with them at the Radio Shack stores in 5th & 6th grade, and later in Junior High, I got special permission to experiment with them. Those were the days...
I just finished the first book: _Red Mars_. I liked it overall, but I found that it dragged when it described geographical (or is that "areographical"?) details of the various expeditions and travels over Mars. The politics and social engineering parts bogged down too. However, the last 100 pages or so was very dynamic and exciting! However, if you tell me that the sequels have even more politics and social engineering minutia, I'm not going to make a priority to read them.
How about a VIA C3 (Ezra) CPU and mainboard? These can run with a passive heatsink -- no fan. This can run office productivity software okay, but they are poor for FP-heavy number cruncher software. Anyway, here is a review: [realworldtech.com] -- Mike
If, as IBM purports, "this new paradigm shifts the fundamental definition of the technology age from one of computing, to one defined by data..." then maybe they should drop the "computing" part of the name. Perhaps "autonomic data access" or "autonomic data systems" or even something wackier. Feel free to make suggestions... I'm sure the slashdot crowd can come up with some winners! ;-)
How about a VIA C3 (Ezra) CPU and mainboard? These can run with a passive heatsink -- no fan. I don't know if Linux distributions work well with them, but they run office productivity software okay. They are poor for FP-heavy number cruncher software. Anyway, here is a review: http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?section=rwtl abs&AID=RWT100401013841
--
Mike
I was a CU grad. student at CU for 3 semesters ('89-'91) and worked across the hall from Dr. Weiman's lab (for Dr. Anderson). I shared an office with another grad. student who was in Weiman's group from about '91 to '92. It's exciting to see them recognized! Their low-temperature techniques were refined over several years of steady work. I second the congratulations!
--
Mike Losh
I've been very intrigued by the Cannon Cat. I have been interested in Forth for over 10 years and have read Raskin's new book, _The Humane Interface_.
I'm playing around with a Cannon Cat-style user interface in my spare time, mostly to see if I would be productive with LEAP-oriented navigation. My experiment is just some rough C++ code written with MFC for Win32. So far it displays text, does LEAP searches, and allows text insertion and deleting. It only uses one mono-spaced font, but it does word-wrapping correctly to break long lines. It does not read or write any data to disk, but I have hard-coded perhaps a thousand words from H. G. Well's _Time Machine_ a bit of other text to let me exeriment moving around and editing. It also can display text in a few different color schemes, which I intend to use for embedded macros/code sequences and other special-purpose things like HTML content someday.
Like the original Cat, I may use Forth as my macro language (probably using FICL to start with) and/or Python (more popular at this time).
I don't know how close to the Cat I can come, since I have never seen an actual one in operation. I have only read descriptions of them in magazines, web pages, Usenet, and from Jef's _Humane Interface_ book. I use the two Alt keys on an IMB keyboard as my LEAP keys, but I think I have a several differences... right now, hitting the Alt(LEAP) key a second time after a leap will leap to the next matching instance in the appropriate direction. I believe the Cat required the user to USE FRONT + LEAP to do this. I allow the left and right cursor (arrow) keys on the IBM keyboard to bump the insertion point left or right, I think the CAT used the LEAP keys to do this (when the user did not combine them with other key presses). I select a range with the F8 key, I think the CAT required the user to press both LEAP keys together to do this. I may make my experimental code more consistent with the CAT, but at a certain level it will be impossible if I still use an IBM 101-key keyboard.
Eventually, my code could become a useable stand-alone OS. But for now, that is very far off -- its more of a toy version of a toy! If I get something I think is actually useful to other people in a stable state, I may publish it under BSD or GPL. The current crop of GUI+desktop systems are getting so complex and burdomsom. I think much more productive and approacable environment can be designed around a Cannon Cat-style UI plus modest amounts of more recent features like embedded pictures, simple diagrams, gesture and pointer-based manipulation, and perhaps voice recognition.
--
Mike
It is probably true that OKAD II could be used to design an Athlon. Lots of people are doing that, and probably Chuck finds that direction uninteresting.
However, it is clearly untrue that "you could design anything Chuck's done on any CMOS CAD. OKAD is nothing special". Based on the very thermal problems you mentioned, Chuck experimented and developed a transistor model taking into account thermal characteristics of the silicon process technology that is much more accurate than the hand-waving approximations of the mainstream design tools. And OKAD II's models can be calibrated to specific silicon production processes. So it is not just a fact that OKAD II is a crippled subset of the typical CMOS CAD suites. OKAD II allows asynchronous logic designs that push a particular silicon production technology to its limits. Ordinary tools are much more conservative. In the past, Chuck's approach was risky, as evidenced by buggy prototypes. Now, OKAD II provides accurate simulations so performance and safety can be balanced by the designer.
Do you get more income from licensing your designs and related technology? From consulting? From something else? Is there much room for a "computer cowboy" in the industry?
You have said in the past (or at least implied) that portability of system and application code is not worthwhile, which flies in the face of software industry. How do you justify this position considering the popularity and success of systems and tools designed for portability such as *BSD, Linux and the GNU toolset?
Similarly, you complain that use of software libraries tend to provide solutions that are bloated, slow, and otherwise sub-optimal. Obviously, some common set of routines or primitives is required. What is, in your view, the proper level of abstraction for the core set of software routines? What do common libraries (C Standard Library, Win32 API, Qt, etc) get wrong? Are there not may application domains where programmer productivity outweighs run-time costs? Conversely, which application domains really demand the custom-fit, non-library approach?
Can you explain why Forth software tends to scale logarithmically in size as application complexity grows, as opposed to linear or exponential scaling of more mainstream development practices? As a longtime Forth follower, I understand this phenomenon to be a result of highly aggressive modularization, which you call "factoring. Can you describe how this seems to be more successful in Forth?
Charles Moore has made several 'clockless' (well, self-clocked) asynchronous CPU designs and created his own CAD tools to do it. He is able to do this by keeping his designs very small and simple... but they are quite fast. Prototype chips of one of his earlier designs are available from Ultra Technology. So far he has been backed only by small companies, probably because he is ten years or so ahead of conventional system designers. -- Mike Losh