Comment by DonHopkins
2 years ago
Mitch Bradley came up with a nice way to refactor the Forth compiler/interpreter and control structures, so that you could use them immediately at top level! Traditional FORTHs only let you use IF, DO, WHILE, etc in : definitions, but they work fine at top level in Mitch's Forths (including CForth and Open Firmware).
I've written about it before on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29261868
Coco Conn and Paul Rother wrote this up about what they did with FORTH at HOMER & Assoc, who made some really classic music videos including Atomic Dog, and hired Charles Moore himself! Here's what Coco Conn posted about it, and some discussion and links about it that I'm including with her permission:
[...]
Forth & Charles Moore
We hired Forth, Inc. and got Charles Moore, the inventor of FORTH to program the console host computer. I learned FORTH and worked with Charles. I programmed the 2K byte EPROM in each visual channel. On the Master Z80 system we ran PolyForth a multi tasking system in 32K bytes. We had an extra 16K RAM for buffers and things. If I remember right, the system ran four tasks, but that was 20 years ago, my memory may be hazy.
Anyway, I learn not only FORTH from Charles Moore, but also how to factor code in to small reusable routines, WORDs they're called in FORTH. I learned Object Oriented Programming without knowing it. Also a lot of use of vectors. Its a cool language. Charles Moore was a great inspiration to me, and really taught me a great deal that they never taught me in computer programming school.
[...]
You worked with Charles Moore? That sounds like a heck of a good story. I feel like he's so underrated as a computer luminary.
I worked with Mitch Bradley at Sun, but not Charles Moore. That was an excerpt from the story written by Coco Conn and Paul Rother about the company they founded with Peter Conn, HOMER & Assoc, which made an early interactive video editing and special effects system that was written in FORTH, which they hired Charles Moore to work on.
The whole story is here, with links to some of the classic music videos they made (like Atomic Doc, Abracadabra, Bongo Bongo, and the Flying Logos SigGraph demo):
>First shown at the 1989 Siggraph Electronic Theater to a rave response, this 3 minute humourous film went on to win several top computer graphic awards that same year including Niccograph of Japan.kjs3
2 years ago
>With a voiceover soundtrack written by Peter Conn and animations assembled from various productions done during the previous year, the film unfolds as a client calls into Flying Logos, Inc. to have his logo visualized. In the course of the conversation, we see and hear the juxtaposition of the technical versus the anticipated, the imagination versus the possibility.
>But more important than amusing audiences and winning awards, this landmark film marked the debut of the PC as a fully capable production system to do broadcast quality work, which up to then was only done by large companies with very expensive graphic workstations.
[Don: I truly believe that in some other alternate dimension, there is a Flying Logo Heaven where the souls of dead flying logos go, where they dramatically promenade and swoop and spin around each other in pomp and pageantry to bombastic theme music. It would make a great screen saver, at least! Somewhere the Sun Logo and the SGI Logo are still dancing together.]
George Clinton - Atomic Dog (Official Music Video) HD
Forth and P-Funk. I certainly didn't get up this morning thinking I'd end it knowing they were related. ^mindblown^