[ColorForth] Chuck Moore to do presentation on OKAD II in Color Forth 4/14

["Michael A. Losh" <forthist@xxxxxxxx>]

Jeff:

Thanks for the detailed answers and the presentation summary in your emails.
I have viewed the first part of the presentation video and am eager to view
the rest as you post them.  You are doing a great service to those of us
interested in this novel technology.  Thank you!  I am thrilled that Chuck
says he is using only 7 cylinders of a floppy disk to store his ColorForth
and OKAD software!  That is just awe-inspiring!

If I may, would it be possible to reenable the download of your "F21 Machine
Forth" video clip of 4/13 to 4/15?  I missed the original download window,
but would very much like to see it.  If you are trying to limit bandwidth,
perhaps you can re-open it after the last Chuck's presentation segments are
posted?
--
Mike Losh
http://members.home.net/forthist/    (Site for my eForth for Java and the
later WebForth version.)

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jeff Fox" <fox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "ColorForth List Member" <ColorForth@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, April 14, 2001 1:00 AM
Subject: [ColorForth] Chuck Moore to do presentation on OKAD II in Color
Forth 4/14


> Dear ColorForth list readers:
>
> Mike wrote:
>
> > I hope you get some good tapes.  I just checked out
http://www.enumera.com/
> > to see what they are saying, because I never heard of them before.  It
was
> > pretty clear that they were working on productizing a MISC chip, without
> > giving away many details.  They seem strongly attached to FreeBSD...
would
>
> John Sokol is the person starting Enumera, he was also the person
> who put BSD into the public domain way back when.  He was already
> involved in the other parallel computing projects listed when
> I brought Chuck down to the Silicon Valley Entrepenuer's Connection
> (formerly the Parallel Processing Connection) to do a presentation
> last summer.  The specifics of the chip work Chuck has been doing
> has been proprietary so I am interested to see how much Chuck will
> make public.  I generally have to wait for him to talk about
> something in public before I can discuss it in public.
>
> Over the years we have frightened and upset a number of people
> by talking about chips that look like the ones they use (same
> size, same cost, same package, and some of the same built in
> I/O devices) but instead of needing 100 cycles of a 1-10Mhz
> clock for a typical Forth word (.1 to .01 Forth mips) Chuck
> has been talking 100 to 500 Forth mips.  So having a CPU
> and I/O coprocessors that are 1000x faster than what people
> are used to has been a problem.  The other people using CPU
> that are hundreds or thousands of times bigger, more complex,
> more expensive, more power hungry, and harder to program have
> also been upset about Chuck making fast cheap chips and
> small simple Forths.  Chuck has upset and frightened a lot
> of people.
>
> At times people have complained that I "use too many zeros" and
> like to remove two or three of them from my numbers.  So while
> the numbers are proprietary at this time I will say that Chuck
> is going to make this situation much worse by adding a lot more
> zeros.  It frightens me sometimes and I am currious to see
> what other people's reactions will be when the numbers are
> released.
>
> > they try to run FreeBSD on MISC?  Perhaps NetBSD would be easier to
port...
> > but either seems too big to really fit well on MISC.
>
> C and BSD fit into the plans but there is no plan that I
> know of to host BSD on a single MISC node.
>
> > Is the Enumera work being done outside iTVC? Or is iTVC dead at this
point?
>
> Enumera is working on aquiring rights from iTV, Chuck Moore and
> Computer Cowboys, Dr. Ting and Offete Enterprises, and Jeff Fox
> and UltraTechnology.  iTV is alive but has been focues on other
> projects.
>
> > Back to ColorForth:  I am currious about how Chuck's latest Color Forth
> > handles system-level things like disk I/O,
>
> Reading and writing of disk tracks.  Similar to the old block
> interface of reading and writing sectors.
>
> > RAM allocation,
>
> Static allocation of some things including Blocks which are just
> memory references.  Some dynamic allocation I imagine in OKAD,
> but I don't think it is abstracted in a conventional way.  The
> idea is that Chuck is using about 20K of code and has 128M
> for data at the present time.
>
> > and interfacing
> > to the 3D accellerator.
>
> On his desktop he used the video card 3D accelerator, on the
> version running on the laptop there is a software layer to
> render the graphics.  The machine redraws the screen as a
> background task running at about 30 to 70 times a second,
> compared to windows that can take several seconds to
> redraw the screen.
>
> > How "generic" are these interface routines?  I know
> > he tends to avoid solving the general problem, but I wonder how flexible
> > ColorForth is today for a variety of applications.
>
> Chuck's Color Forth is pretty specialized.  It has boot, video,
> disk, and keyboard services, and will get sound and network card
> interfaces since Chuck has documentation and plans.
>
> He asked to look at a book I have on modern subsonic aerodynamic
> simulations.  I can imagine that his Color Forth would make a
> nice environment to get high speed simulations as the problem
> resembles his CAD problems in some ways.  But I doubt if it
> would be seen as very generic by too many people.
>
> Of course Chuck sees it as completely generic.  He says that
> not knowing what task he was going to solve he would arm
> himself with a couple of K of generic code, known as Color
> Forth, and would extend it into an application.
>
> > I don't know if you will
> > see this email before the presentation, but if these topics do not come
up,
> > perhaps you can try to ask a question or two on my behalf.  I think
others
> > may be interested, like the author of Enth, Sean Pringle.  Thanks.
>
> I have to get going pretty soon.  More later.
> Jeff
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