The first post is actually heavily edited from its original, last night. He cut out about 2 paragraphs where he talked about the "3 whiskeys" hey drank, as well as a problem that he has that the internet might be able to help with. (No specifics)
I'm impressed that he basically kept the same spirit of the post though instead of just deleting the whole thing. I wonder what prompted the original post though.
"he cut out about 2 paragraphs where he talked about the "3 whiskeys" he drank"
It was there an hour ago, when I submitted this, as were a few sentences about how hard it was to hit the right keys on the keyboard with "3 whiskeys" inside him. Coupled with the note about attempting to raise some money and failing to led my comment about it being poignant.
Maybe he just woke up sober and didn't like what he'd typed when he was a little intoxicated.:-)
It was fine writing. Too bad he felt the need to delete it. (but understandable, blogging while (tending to) drunk might be too ...interesting )
Now that I see he was OK the next day, I don't feel bad for laughing so hard at it. Maybe he worries that it would cause people to think badly of him, but in my case, anyway, it just reveals a more human, vulnerable side, which doesn't diminish my respect for his intellect in the least. It said:
Hi. I'm at the cabin. Have had 3 whiskeys. It's been a hard day. And it's really hard to type.
I talked to mortgage consultant Craig today, about raising money on my Incline Village property. No joy.
I drank my whisky at my Yuba River outlook. Very peaceful. My insight was that I need to use this web access to seek a solution to a dilemma. You can help. I'll get back to you.
Walking back from the Yuba River outlook, I encountered a deer leg. Something killed a deer and brought its leg there. How ephemeral we all are.
I brought to the cabin 1/8 cord of oak firewood. It was delivered to my house, I loaded it onto the Jeep and drove it here. Tomorrow I'll stack it. You know, this keyboard is almost unusable after 3 whiskeys. Hit the wrong key and funny things happen. That does not happen with the colorForth editor.
You know, dealing with File Manager on the Earthlink website is just as keystroke prone. It took me many tries and much confusion to post this comment.
Chuck is an absolutely amazing guy. Read up on his 'homebrew' cad system to lay out chips, it is quite a lesson in how strongly a user interface can influence a process.
TILs (threaded-interpreted-languages) have a very natural aspect to them, almost as if that is how you are supposed to develop software.
In spite of that, actually doing it is pretty hard, one of the reasons why forth never took off as a mainstream language. Still, in embedded control it is fairly common, mostly because it is one of the easiest to bootstrap high level languages.
Keyboard
Continuing my experiments with keyboards, I currently prefer using 27 keys to provide the 48 characters needed. These are the home keys of a standard 101-key keyboard, allowing the other 74 to be ignored.
The assignment of the keys changes, with the current one displayed on-screen at lower right. It's pleasantly easy to type while referring to the display. These keys minimize finger travel, as close to Dvorak's arrangement as 27 keys permit.
They are used as function keys (menu selects) for applications. The only text that needs to be typed is when editing source code.
Other arrangements are possible. Including, gulp, standard qwerty.
Yep. legend has it he had a chair with who triplets of keys taped to the armrests to control the cursor and place the gates by 'chording', using a system he called 'Okad'.
one hand would control the cursor, the other the placement of the gates or wires.
Would be nice if someone could corroborate or disprove that, I always thought it completely matched the rest of the stories about Chuck Moore so I give it a good chance of being true.
Are you saying you've seen a detailed description of OKAD's user interface somewhere? I haven't, and I'd love to read it. Chuck doesn't seem to want to release it.
I was 'into forth' a good bit in the mid 80's, I worked together with a german programmer that really 'grokked' it (Lothar, his biggest dig at me was to call 'C' a 'great' language, by which he meant 'so verbose that it takes a lot of keystrokes to do simple stuff, to tease him I wrote a Forth in C ;) ), I was the newbie learning little by little.
We got some pretty hot forth hardware to play with (first chip of the 'Novix' line, pre-production) and we did neat stuff with it.
(until someone dropped a dime onto the experimental board when it was powered up that is, after that I had to pull some long nights coding a C replacement of our OCR code to save a demo... those were the days :) ).
Anyway, during the run up to this we got all kinds of good stuff on what was going on with the design of the chip, and my colleague Charly had some direct contact with Chuck, the stories about Okad come from him.
Charly was pretty good with the routing packages on our PDP-11 himself but he revered Chuck.
See my other post in this thread for some more details.
edit: iirc there was something about the Novix that was classified, I remember having to sign a bunch of documents about it being 'strategic'. I don't remember the details though.
Is that Charley the Charley Shattuck mentioned in the 7/21 entry at http://www.ultratechnology.com/blog.htm? Looks like he's still working with Chuck. Lucky guy.
The best thing about Forth is that it's the distilled result of decades of iteration on a complete programming environment by a great programmer. I don't know of any other examples of this. The worst thing about Forth is that it will probably die with Chuck and be mostly lost.
Well, there's ColorForth, the environment Chuck uses, which I think is used by Chuck and another person or two. That really might be lost.
Then there's Forth, the huge family of languages, including an ANSI standard. There's no risk that it will be lost within the next few centuries, unless the human race disappears.
Chuck Moore is one of very few people on the planet that can say that he built his whole platform, chips included from the ground up. There ought to be a statue somewhere in name of the guys achievements.
I very much hope that somebody will get to document his legacy before it gets lost. That would be a worthwhile undertaking.
Well, Jeff Fox has been documenting it for a while.
Can you think of any other people who have done the same thing? Chuck surely isn't the only person ever to have designed his own CPU, but I don't know of any others who have done both the hardware and the software.
I admire what he's done but I'm still not sure whether the work is actually important in some objective sense. It certainly appeals to the Robinson Crusoe in me, but I'm not sure if it's actually useful, just because the level of compatibility is so low.
It's amazingly useful! It teaches you more about computing than anything ever will.
There was a bit on here about a guy that did his own computer from the ground up using ttl level logic, but I'm not aware of anybody that did his own chips including the routing.
Is it important to others ? Yes, again I think it is:
- a series of amazingly performant chips came out of that (novix, shboom and now the a series)
- lots of people got to see that it was possible which is inspiring (it certainly is for me)
- the fact that the compatibility is so low is actually a boon, this means that you get to think in ways off the beaten path, which is a good thing. It gets people to think outside of the box for a bit. That's always a great way to widen your perspective permanently.
Even today, there isn't a cell phone that does not have a forth interpreter stashed away in its innards! (I can find you a reference for that if you want).
Well, to me "educational" and "useful" are kind of orthogonal. I've made lots of things that were highly educational to make, often because they forced me to think "off the beaten path", but that doesn't make the things themselves useful. In fact, most of them were kind of crap. So I'm mostly thinking about the "important to others" aspect.
The Novix NC4000 and ShBoom came out at a time when compatibility was a lot less important. I agree that they were important and useful to others! Similarly Forth: it didn't start out compatible with anything else except for some computers, but now it runs on any chip, under any OS, and can control all kinds of peripherals. Which is why every cellphone has some Forth in it. (I don't know specifics but they have enough different processors that I'm sure you must be right.)
I'm not so sure about the c18 line (what's the "a series"?) because it seems like they're competing more with FPGAs than microcontrollers, but they don't have the tool support that FPGAs have.
When the ShBoom came out more than 20 years ago, the Verilog and VHDL toolchains were very limited. Now you can download all kinds of crazy stuff off OpenCores, synthesize it, and put it on your FPGA.
Similarly the available C was very limited, and it might take some work to get it to compile for whatever kind of random no-name manufacturer minicomputer you had, or if you had a microcomputer, it might take you a lot of work to find out that it just wasn't going to fit. And of course the available open-source code was pretty limited. Today you can be pretty sure that there's code out there that solves a big chunk of your problem, you can compile it for your computer pretty easily (unless it's a microcontroller or a C18 or an FPGA) and it will fit.
So I think it's possible that the c18 series will turn out to be "amazingly performant" in practice for a wide range of applications, just as FPGAs have the potential to be "amazingly performant". But it's far from guaranteed. You can't just put a bunch of FPGAs (or 40c18s or GA-4s) on a board and be done. After that you have to build software for it.
And I'm pretty sure that Chuck is the only one who's going to use the 40c18 for ASIC simulation.
It might turn out that it's so much easier to build software for a 40c18, or that the GA-4 is so much cheaper than a Spartan-II, that the tooling and compatibility differences will turn out not to matter. But they are real problems. Saying that it's "actually a boon" that you can't run any existing software on the chip is kind of dumb.
No, he was a German guy living in the Netherlands, originally he worked for 'NikHef', the nuclear physics lab in Amsterdam, then he founded his own company and I was one of their coders (originally co-founder but there were some 'issues' so I declined).
I'm impressed that he basically kept the same spirit of the post though instead of just deleting the whole thing. I wonder what prompted the original post though.