

Chuck Moore: Forth, The Last Ten Years and The Next Two Weeks - wingo
http://www.forth.org/fd/FD-V01N6.pdf

======
paulhart
My first (significant) paid programming job was writing FORTH for an
industrial laundry control system. All the software was written in FORTH,
regardless of the platform - the PIC CPUs that drove the counting systems were
FORTH-based, as was the Windows application that managed everything.

Yes, windows apps in FORTH. It was amusing. If you needed access to more of
the Win32 API, you updated a header file and recompiled the FORTH interpreter
:) Good times.

Both the company and the FORTH supplier still exist today:

<http://www.microssautomation.com/>

<http://www.mpeforth.com/>

~~~
limmeau
Laundry control? I remember a line from a Forth tutorial which introduced what
the colon does.

: WASHING-MACHINE (drawn picture of a washing machine) ;

So that wasn't just an illustration after all!

~~~
listic

      : WASHER ( -- ) WASH SPIN RINSE SPIN ;
    

<http://www.forth.com/embedded/swiftx-embedded-systems-7.html>

It's in the tutorial. :-)

~~~
limmeau
I've looked it up. The picture I remember was in Leo Brodie's Starting Forth:

<http://www.forth.com/starting-forth/sf1/sf1.html>

------
thristian
(this seems to be a scan of the March/April 1980 edition of the newsletter of
the Forth Interest Group, containing the text of Chuck Moore's speech from the
October 1979 Forth Convention in San Francisco)

------
Janzert
If you find yourself bored with the article at least skip down to the end and
read the Q&A discussion at the end. I found it pretty interesting to read his
speculation about where the future of computing was heading. His description
of the ideal computer is interestingly close to an iphone, although the iphone
still lacks a bit.

