Forth Dimensions/Volume 1/Number 1/Evolution of a F.I.G. Forth Freak
I have been actively involved in the personal computing movement since early in 1974 when I shelled out $120, for an 8008 chip. Since that time my hardware and software have evolved into a very powerful and useful system, of which FORTH is a principal component. The system consists of an LSI-11, 28K of memory, 2 Diablo disks, an LA30 DECWRITER, a Diablo HYTYPE-I printer, a VDM-1 display, and dual floppy disk drives. Obtaining an operating system which would effectively utilize all of this hardware initially appeared to be much too expensive for an individual to buy, and far too complex to write from scratch. This attitude changed when early in 1976 I read a technical manual describing the internal organization of a relatively unknown "language" called FORTH. Here was a programming system which included not only an editor, assembler, and file management system, but the inherent capability to be rapidly expanded to perform any computer function I could define. The best part was the fact that the central core of this programming system was relatively small and would easily fit into 3K of memory. The large majority of the system programming could be done in terms of high level functions which I would have the freedom to define.
After about three months of late nights and pulling my hair out, I finally had a stand alone FORTH system which I could bootstrap and then use to load application vocabularies from disk. Once the basic implementation was fully debugged my general throughput of useful application software increased to a level I never would have thought possible, I can't over-emphasize the satisfaction associated with implementing the language from scratch. An added benefit of this approach is the flexibility derived by having a 100% understanding of ALL of the code your machine is executing.
Today I have application vocabularies which can do everything from playing a BACH minuet on a computer controlled synthesizer to generating, sorting, and printing the FORTH INTEREST GROUP mailing list. It is my hope that with the continued growth of the FORTH INTEREST GROUP and the establishment of some syntactical standards, widespread exchange of applications vocabularies will greatly enhance the computing power of all users of FORTH-like languages.