Holy Doodle Batman

[theFox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Jeff Fox)]

Dear MISC readers:

>From: Eugene Leitl <eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de>

> > I am NOT trying to ruin any other efforts (far from it!), but I must
> > acknowledge a "class act" when I see one -- puts me to shame, almost.
>
>You make a very good point here. I was met with hoots of derision when 
>I tried peddling the F21 using the web docs to developer friends of
>mine. Having first class documentation cannot be valued high
>enough (with the possible exception of shipping working silicon).

Can you explain the "hoots of derision"?  

From: Wayne Morellini <waynemm@hotmail.com>

>F21 chips that 
>nobody really wants to buy because there ill suited to the market.  With 
>them being as usefull as a backside scratcher. 

Can you explain what market you were refering to?

I learned a lot from ShBoom.  I got the programming manual and studied
it and discussed the ideas with Chuck a lot, but hey that was that was
ten years ago!

I think I would summarize the recent discussions as saying that the
options we have today are:

1. work the common RISC or CISC chips
2. work with fifteen year old Forth chips although they are getting hard to find
   (Novix, RTX etc)  (sc32 is in between)
3. work with ten year old Forth chips recently released
   (Shboom)
4. work with your own versions of the old designs like the Novix from Russia,
   or the Novix in FPGA in Sweden, QS-5 or P16 in FPGA etc.
5. work with Chuck's vlsi chips from 5 years ago (P21)
6. work with Chuck's latest vlsi designs
7. work out your own new designs in FPGA or VLSI

If you need more documentation to get started you might want older
things that have had more time to be documented.  If you want to be
out in front then hopefully you will write some documentation for those
who may also want to move to more modern designs.

There may be other options that I have not listed.  As for ShBoom I must
admit that I haven't followed all the changes made to ShBoom since it was
taken from Chuck in 1988 or 89.  I know one of the designers claims that 
in order to make ShBoom II more attractive to Java and "C" programmers
that some of the operations that are important to Forth were degraded.  
In a  way it is a little like what was done to Forth in ANS Forth.