F21 status, Tinglish, dyslexia is smart

[jfox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Jeff Fox)]

Dear MISC readers,

>Since you seem to be in a mood to communicate recently,
>(which I always enjoy reading), I wonder if you could
>give us an update on the status of the F21.  The last
>explicit information which I saw was in your "F21
>Microprocessor Status" page where, at the end of the
>most recent update, you say "The analog I/O coprocessor,
>video I/O coprocessor, and serial/network coprocessor,
>and real time clock will be tested when I add a few more
>wires to the test board."  

No. I prayed that it would.  I could not believe after what
I have been though for the last ten years, and in particular
the last six months that I would be in this situation.  I hung
everything over the edge for one last time on the gamble
that I could sell one chip for 1/50th of what it cost me
to be able to finish the project.  I saw this as no more than
saying after ten years, is there one person who has any interest?
That seemed like the only thing in the last years that was not
impossible.

I had $20 to my name when I got my chips.  $20 and 25 chips and
more morgages and debts and long overdue bill notices and a trail
of divorce, bankruptcy, broken ties with family members, and
other sacrifices to put myself into that situation volunteerely.
And I was so excited that no one will ever know.

I had to spend my money on gas to go drive to iTV to do the
initial testing.  I had to use an iTV board because all the
people who claimed they would help out with test boards flaked
out and I was broke so I tested everything I could given this
one more contraint and was pleased to announce that the chip
worked as expected in all test I had run on the CPU DRAM ROM and
PPORT.  I announced that with pleasure and that testing
would continue as soon as funding arrived from some sales or
anywhere.  I would also be able to eat.

But there were no sales.  Every day I would get fifty emails
asking the status.  I would mail to them what I just mailed
to the list and say that I was going to have to go without
food or testing of my chips until someone helped out and
that it was terribly frustrating.

Still these same people would write back the next day, have
you finished testing yet?

December was bleak. I had no food and was quite ill around
Christmas and felt that some aspirin and cough syrup and
maybe a bowl of chicken soup might have made me feel better
but I had to fast from Christmas through New Years at home alone
without any food and running a fever hoping that someone
somewhere someday might buy a chip or something.

I have been living on a budget of $1.25 a week since New Years.
It is difficult and frustrating.  The other day I spend 23 hours
doing email.  Since I have no phone it is like my email is
the last thing still here.  If all you have left is your
phone and a notice that they will unplug it you are likely
to enjoy your last chance to use it and talk on the phone
all the time just before they pull the plug.  Who knows, maybe
one of your friends might be in a position to help.

Yesterday I reached the limit after four months like that without
one sale and having somehow missed getting that email plug pulled
too.  I was in the process of renameing
http://www.ultratechnology/indxdead.htm    to index.html to
make it my home page when Lloyd suggested an alternernative.
That is how close it came, maybe two seconds.

After ten years like this the last four months of being in an
unbelievably frustrating situation had me out the door.  You
see folks I really think that each chip I have is worth the
$25,000 that I have in them.  They are worth that to me.
I feel very very bad about selling them to anyone who
doesn't know what they are, isn't going to do something really
cool with them or give them a good home.

As Hans Morovec would say, these are my mind children.  If
you sacrificed everything to save your children and was
sitting there watching them starve would you be willing to
sell one of your children so the others could eat?  How
would you feel if that was the situation and someone was 
then trying to bargain you down as far as they could to 
see just how despirate you were and just how low you would 
go selling one child to save another.  That is not fun.

I also have a terrible responsibility toward these little
things. They are more dangerous than any of you will
ever know.  Everyone knows the first application of
every new breakthrough technology. I could be rich now.

I really looked forward to giving away chips to all the
people interested and rareing to contribute.  This was
never about making money.  You can't imagine how
dissapointed I was to learn that after ten years I 
could not find one interested person except ex
iTV employees who also were in similare sitations
to mine although not as severe.

I am very serious about people giving them good homes.
I don't want them being abused and used for evil or
starved from lack of interest.  I am interested in
each one.  I haven't given each chip it's  individual
name yet.  I guess I was going to let new owners give
them thier own names like "spot" of "fido" or "simon"
or "peggy".  I do worry about people who want to
abuse thier puppy and name him "satan".
I am trying to be careful about this project but until
I got these babies back in my hands I hadn't thought
about all the social and historic implications of
the way the technology got released, or maybe didn't
get released.

People don't know how happy I will be to feel that
by keeping my children in a good home with their syblings
and dad and having lots of fun even if I am living on $1.25
a week or on the street knowing that I got the idea out
to YOU but kept the chips away from the people who wanted
to use them to kill or enslave humanity.  I am not talking
about enslaving humanity with manipulating marketing and
media lulling them until they are complacent and drownding
in apethy, but enslaving them as in Daleks.

A Dalek is a science fiction character from Dr.Who.  Dr.Who
is the most low budget sci fi series ever.  The Daleks are
the most low budget enemy of Dr.Who where everything is low
budget.  They are ruthless cyborgs designed to control
and enslave things like human beings to do stuff for them
that they are not sophisticated to get done themselves.  Just 
threaten a fragile but smart organic being. 

I hope no cyborgs on the internet read the last sentance
and think it sounds like a good idea. It would be a
lot easier to make that than to create something much more human
than that.  F21 was designed to be smart enough to have
morality or at least try to do Asimov's Laws.

I am going to have a lot of fun with my chips.  I will
post the first true promotional information about the
chips before I go on vacation.

Chuck told me ten years ago that I should not promote
the chips before I had working chips or no one would
take me seriously when he gave me working chips in
three months.  I took a little longer and no one will
ever know how frustrating it has been as I have told
Chuck to explain 10% and lose everyone because they
can't believe it.

I thought I might post a page called Under the Hood.
I would like to talk about programming coprocessors. I never
even get past, is it a toy? Laughter.  I want to talk
about the 10 gigahertz programmable components that you are playing
with under the hood and how smart they are and the incredibly smart 
and clever things in those Chuck Smart coprocessors and I/O
devices are.  I told him NEVER talk about the echo timer. You
are just too far ahead.  No one will believe that.
 
After the 5000th inquiry as to is chip testing complete yet 
I headed for the door happy that I would begin testing
MY chips and playing with them again next year after I
switch to a job where you get paid. I not longer wanted
to sell any of my children.  They are small but they
are much stronger than I thought, and much smarter.  They
have already learned my trick of surviving hardship
so I know they can make it.

I was telling someone last night about some of the stuff
under the hood. What do you know about the research on the
neurology of Einstein's brain?  Well some of it went into
the design of this baby.  It is my mind child after all.
People have no idea how smart it is.  I know it is a lot
smarter than I first realized because I have had ten
years to do more research on how to get more smarts out
of what is in there.

But instead of saying, look folks this has been fun, it isn't
anymore.  This project has been about two things. Getting this
idea out to you and having a grand adventure.  I did both
I was just supprised that there would be so little enthusiasm
that I would just decide that I really should keep them all
and that that wasn't being greedy.

People ask me questions that imply to me they have never spent
more than ten minutes at my site before deciding that asking
questions is easier than reading hypertext and looking at
diagrams so they start with me first.

No one wants to contribute anything except to put into one
more time loop where nothing has happend that I like, no
fun, no testing, no food, minimal partying, no chip sales,
no help other than 100 pages of:

>Has this happened, and how
>have they been working?  You seem to be implying in
>your latest post that they are working, but are they?
>In particular, I have always wondered how fast you would
>be able to communicate between nodes with your network
>coprocessor.  Is this working out as planned?

No it is NOT working out as planned.  Have YOU finished
testing them?  What have YOU done for me recently? 
I have always said that pushing the network to the max
would be the last hardware test.

>I try not to be a pest, but I (and I am sure there are
>many others too) are very curious about the status of
>the F21 project.

I have been told so many times, don't give it up.  Just wait
a little longer. Just hold out.  It isn't fun any more.  I
have been holding out, watching the bills pile up for eight
months now since I channeled all money to the last fab run
for the last eight months.  I can't do bankruptcy again
and I really thought I would be on the street again this 
week.

I have been there before.  When you are a driven person
who can work 23 hour days on a $1.25 a week budget for months
it was clearly never about money.  But I have been on the
street before and I know how hard that can be to.  I would
rather not do that because of being forced to.  I could
happily choose it, but I am always unconfortable when you
are trying your best to do something that is mostly about
helping others and you are forced to sleep outside in the
rain and forage for food.  I have been there and I feel
like I am getting a little old for it.  I am also getting
too old to enjoy 23 hour work days.  I started sleeping
every day at least rather than working all nigth
three nights a week in addition to all 7 days this year.

I have been told that I should consider the fifty people
asking me again every day if I am done as a sign of interest.
I wish I could.  When I tell them that it is killing me to
be going throught this, like I just have to the MISC mail
list and then I get the same mail from them the next day
I am just devastated.  It came -><- this close yesterday.

I will ship back orders, I can ship a chips but that is about
it.  As soon as I ship the remaining back orders today I
am on vacation for a month.  This will be my first paid
vacation in 14 years.  Even if it is funded on $1.25 a
week I am going to enjoy my first time off.

On another thread:

As for Dr. Ting's quality control, I understand his approach and as
I have said he published the only documentation on so many things
that if he took the time to proofread there would be no documentation
at all on a lot of things.  He did it first and in many cases
remains the only source for information on many subjects.

Personally I find Tinglish quite charming.  I worry about proofreading
his work when I post it.  I do correct technical things and have
sent him sheets noting things that need correct in a future release
if he ever gets it.

I worry about translating Tinglish into English because it might take
away the fun.  I made this change, but thought it was funnier in Tinglish.

>> Forth is often mentioned not only as a computer language but also a
>> religion, because of its feverish followers.
                            fervorish

On another thread:

I wish people were more dyslexic.  Dyslexia or however you spell it
is smart. People are very unfocused.  Their attention and focus
jumps like a monkey from tree to tree.  We have to pay attention
and think. We have to focus.  We have to train ourselves to do that.

I make compromises. I type so much stuff so fast that I make a lot
of typos.  I can't see a lot of them and I don't backspace and
fix them because I am communicating as in speech in my mind.  I
used to have a photographic memory until I started to have to run
too many compress and reject useful information routines when
sleeping or meditating.  I quit doing that at about age 20. As
someone told me last night, some people can memorize books
page by page by glancing at them and be able to go back and
read it to you, but they never really were THINKING about it.
Better to think about what is in that book than memorize it.

Speech is incredibly redundant. So are most written languages.
They have inherent structures with syntax, semantics, and
contextual reference so that your mind can finish the sentance
quite naturally or fill in a word when the noise level in
the room makes it impossible to hear a word in a conversation.
We have a lot of circuitry to make this possible and part of
it has to do with not being distracted.

When I type and tranpsose a few chartcres along the way by
running my brain jst a litle faster than my fingers there
is still a sentance.  When I am speaking I hope the person
listening is smart enough to not be distracted by the noise
that made them miss one word in the sentance and still follow
my thought well enough to fill in the gap and stay with me.
They usually can, they are smart enough. It makes sense
because this is smart, and we have evolved lots of neurons
very specialized for speech communication over a long time.
A little noise thrown in doesn't trigger that dumb monkey
to jump.

But we haven't been doing written communication very long.  Not
long enough so evolve specialized hardware I think to do that
visually unless you think of that as dislexia.  If you throw
noise into the dyslexics character stream they can't see it.
They are automatically smart enough to simply reject the
spelling with transposed characters as being functionally
differenent word worthy of attention.  It doesn't frighten
their monkey to jump.

When I type sometimes I transpose characters and I can proofread
it and never see them.  For me proofreading is reading first
for correct sentance construction and then going character by
character forward and backward two characters forward and
one character back or I cannot see most of my typos.  I feel
like I have a lot of important things to do and important
things to say and important things to tell people.  Mostly
to smart people who can follow the ideas.  It is almost
like thinking out loud.  

I have noticed that a lot of people can't read what I write
without letting a tiny bit of noise catch most their attention.
boy speech sure couldn't work like that.  We are not smart
with character streams as with sound streams.  We are more
easily blocked from thinking by distractions.  When someone
is talking you rarely only notice that he ended his sentance
in a preposition and take the time to change the direction
of the conversation to talk about that.  But with written
stuff people are more easily distracted.  At least I seem
to get a lot of email about typos.  sometimes, rarely,
I go back to correct them.  It is hard work because I can't
see them I just wish more people were smart enough to keep
their attention on what I was saying.  

I think the stuff I say should warrent a much higher percentage
of my communciation bandwidth should be spent by people telling
me that an h and a t are transposed on page and line so and
so in this document! It creates a nonsense word that requires
fuzzy logic to find after first searching dictionary of valid
words in a linear fashion. That is too much work. So rather
than continue to follow the thought that was being made I
am jumping off into a discussion about finding that in your
latest docuemnt you transposed two characters and created an
nonselse word that any idiot could not mistake for the correct
word in that sentance. Please please take the time to go back
and search that document character by character linearly
comparing it to the dictionary search.  I am not smart enough
for fuzzy logic. It triggers my monkey.

Now where I am I going with all this?  Can you guess?  You should
be able to.

I am thinking that Chuck has now told these people about some stuff 
a dozen times.  Are they smart enough to not let every quirky detail
about Chuck and his work distract them and make their monkey jump
or are they smart enough to realize the gems and wisdom and
knowledge that he is putting before them again?  Are they
thinking about every quirky detail imposed by some design
decision and focusing their attention on that?  Their is an
incredible amount of intellectual noise in Chuck's stuff
because he is a contrary and every detail will trigger your
monkey to jump.  

I noticed that Chuck was doing the impossible ten years ago by
making chips that had better performance for everything I wanted
to do, Forth, real-time, embedded than Intel. Novix vs 386 and
he was designing them by writing his own VLSI cad software and
performing miracles with Forth every day.  I couldn't understand
how he could do any of that or make things with 1000x times
fewer gates etc.

Most people couldn't see it.  Of course the people who told
them about it never saw it.  Everyone saw the 3 key keyboard
and that was all they would talk about for a couple of years.
I guess that one triggered everyone's monkey. It still does.
It does for me, but the monkey it triggers in is jump in your face.
When it was the first question last year at Forth day I
thought why do people think that it funny to focus on the
stuff that keeps you away from the idea?  Why do people think
it is funny to ask one more time about the details of the
differnece between i and 1 in his font.  I mean here are
30 people who have just been told all these amazing science
fiction stuff about his circuits and discoveries in transistor
modeling and behavior, show you the equations and said that
no one else in the world know it, except for this room of
people.  Are they listening or are they being distracted
by the 1000 quirky things in the background like Chuck's 
screen size, font, character shapes, differences between
character shapes and how that effect word processing if
you tried to do word processing with OKAD, etc etc.
Why do they allow their monkey to jump on every one of
those and ask him only questions about those things over
and over and over and over.  There was not a single question
about the cool way that he calibrated the reverse thermal
modeling.  There are almost never any questions about
what his is talking about and so many questions about 
the noise.  The questions about the noise create just more
noise and everyone's attention is brought back to how many
keys he was using.  He has more important ideas folks.  He
is so patient!

Even so I have sensed a growing frustration on his part in
this sense.  It am sure it is not as strong as mine.  I
worry while I am talking that their will be no questions
about anything I said and just noise questions.  I have
gone beyond considering them noise questions.  They have
become my buttons.

I am not going to go into the details of the kinds of 
sacrifices that I have made to be the only person working
with and supporting Chuck on developing his ideas but
suffice it to say that I do not enjoy jokes about being
ten years behind schudule. I don't enjoy jokes about
the project being so far behind that it is sure to fail
and I should have known that I would never sell a
single chip.  I don't enjoy skits put on about how I
must feel like I am in a time loop or close to a black
hole.  I am not as patient as Chuck about this sort
of thing.  

When I give a presentation now and the questions are all
like that I wonder why I ever did any presentations before
Forth people.  All I could ever guess was that the fact
that everything about us triggers all their monkeys
is why they won't listen to anything for so many years.

OK.  This group is not FIG. this is the MISC mail list.
You are listening. You are thinking. I don't get tons
of email here about a typo in something I posted to MISC
or lots of email saying that I must have been stupid
to have thought that anyone would ever care or want
to get involved.  That comes from the web site and FIG
and most of that I think is dominated by 'C' these days.

I feel like we made a breakthrough this week. I think we
started a lot of people thinking about Forth and what
it is rather than focusing on the quirky details in
the ANSI standard.  I feel like some people started
to get the idea that Chuck's Forths have been getting
more Forth like.  From what Wil Baden called Hardware
Forth to the Machine Forth stage Chuck gave us a whole
new Forth and told us about it.  There were many
distractions.  He was also talking about OK, OKAD, VLSI,
transistors, design styles and other things and when
he first started it the quirkyness was very distracting.

To complicate things Chuck wasn't very good at not
jumping around himself in his perspetive as he talked
about his chip from inside of it in OKAD and from outside
of it in Machine Forth looking down at the machine.

One day he tried to explain the concept of numbers vs
patterns and how that is useful to him as he moves his
focus from inside to the outside of the chip and it
sounded like you were going to need a Phd to add 2+2
on my chip.  My head was spinning and I understood
everything he said. I looked around at the room full
of people and their heads were spinning so much that
they couldn't hear a word for the rest of the hour
and were convinced that you couldn't program anything
like that.  I told Chuck never to do that.  When mixed
to those two concepts and explained them at the same
time it did a lot damage.  Stick to Chuck in OKAD or Forth
but these people are not ready for how your job is
thinking about both at once when designing either one.

       MACHINE
MACHINE Chuck MACHINE<-- Forth Chuck
       MACHINE 

I had the feeling that many people just began to
understand about how Machine Forth was just his latest best
Forth, it is not a quirky machine.

You could implement Machine Forth in my opinion or your own
variation of it on the old classic virtual machine model
or on the new MISC virtual machine.  I this group I think
people are more willing to consider using some new primitive
Forth words and some new commands like the -IF -UNTIL
words.  You could do that.  Chuck has been encouraging people
to do this but not many have.

I would like to see someone port Machine Forth (the trivial
inlining stc compiler) and a small set of Forth words.  Use
the classic ones, a good experiment.  Do it like eForth.
That is the eForth model also to a great extent except
no one has ported the inlining stc compiler to eForth.

The eForth philosophy is to implement a standard set of
primitive words in CODE, consider it a virtual machine
and then write Forth for it.  It is easy to port and
experiment. 

I can post the assembler from OK, it is at my site.  I can
post the assembler for f21, I have several, the sources
are there.  Chuck didn't like calling it assembler at iTV
because the design is a portable stc compiler with inlining
for the MISC virtual machine.  In fact the machine is not
virtual for Chuck.  He doesn't even call it Virtual Machine
Forth on the Pentium.  He calls it Machine Forth.

Other people can and should experiment with it.  It is so
simple so powerful so productive to face the machine and
think about the code you are writing.  I don't think that
the improvements that Chuck added are as important as
that mentality of facing down at the machine rather
than looking away.

cmForth had neat tricks and I marvel over it for years. But
it was an assembler because its optimizations were totally
Novix specific.  It was ported to RTX and by Frank to Intel.
People liked it but it never caught on widely as an approach.

I hope that this new more portable approach of using a
trivially simple stc assembler and inline the kernel words
will catch in with both classic virtual machine implementations
and MISC virtual machine implementations.  I did some of that
sort of thing for a couple of years and gave Chuck lots
of feedback about the relative usability of the changes
to the instructions by comparing the simulated performance
of code matched to one set of instructions compared to another
set.

It could be mixed with tokenized Forth to get smaller opcodes
that pack like MISC along with bit threading.  That would
certainly be an interesing implemention to see documented
and compared to other approaches.  

We all read more, I would like to see someone do a, than
I did a, everywhere.  I am sorry to do that and offer
all these suggestions but I am on vacation officially just
filling a few back orders.

I was skeptical about all the wierd changes Chuck had made to
his Forth virtual machine model.  But second guessing Chuck
is generally a waste of time and my simulations seemed to
say that he had been very clever in the design changes to
the instruction set and architecture that he did.  they
seemed quirky to until I started coding with them and they
were fine.  then the simulations indicated that they indeed
a very good match and hard for me to improve.  Of couse we
did make a number of small changes to different instructions
and some were removed and others added.

It was always easy to change the instructions on a simulated
processor, modify the Forth, port code and compare.  You can
also do the same thing easily on any computer by implementing
different virtual machines, writing some code for them
and comparing results.  

I don't really think we want to standardize too much on
this set of instructions and stick to it.  Chuck won't.
If he thinks of a better one he will switch to it tomorrow.
Do you know how much fun it is to call him up and tell him
about your new instruction and have him say great I
will add that.  thanks.  You can do that folks.  Think,
experiment.  Design your improvements, add new optimizations
to the trivial compiler.  Don't be afraid of a new
virtual machine that makes you think about moving the
code to it to take advantage of new things.  The main thing
is look down at the machine and think about it.

Chuck is designing chips and I have written lots of system
tools and documentation and system code at iTV and Ultra
Technology, so have other people.  I have posted lots of
stuff to the web site and tried to explain things to
individuals, this list, c.l.f, and FIG for ten years.
I love the list because I hit more and more individuals
do understand all the time.  I feel like I finally got
a few at FIG and c.l.f to consider that Chuck is
still interested in Forth and trying very had to explain
all these things that he has discovered.  He just moves
ahead to fast for us too really keep up very well.

Jeff Fox

Fervorish to the point that maybe feverish is a better term. ;-) 
-