[ColorForth] Toys (was USB and other serial bit boffing)

[Myron Plichota <myron.plichota@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thursday 06 December 2001 12:29 am, Jeff Fox wrote:
> a green light, paying for repairs, insurance,
> license and registration fees, tickets,
> and gas and oil are not attached to the toy
> toy cars and _most_ of the fun still is.

When I was a kid I dreamed about having a computer to play with, and now that 
the dream has turned into a day to day reality (sometimes a nightmare), I 
still get great pleasure from cavorting about the playground. The only thing 
that spoils the fun is when city hall erects barriers and posts regulations 
that interfere with free, spontaneous, and imaginative play.

I cherish the notion that someday I will be running a simple but powerful 
"toy" computer with the best ideas we have seen implemented, but with a 
simple, consistent, efficient, and direct interface to the hardware and base 
software. Jeff's stories about single afternoon MachineForth orientation 
briefings for programmers at iTV and the resulting immediate productivity are 
an excellent case in point.

This is impossible when relying on commodity PCs to provide the hardware: 
it dooms the software to endless complications. What is wrong with the idea 
of designing something that resembles a Jupiter Ace (Timex/Sinclair 
TS-1000 aka ZX-81 with Forth in ROM), keeping it simple, and providing the 
hooks for individual users to take the ball and run in whatever direction 
they choose?

The combined and individual expertise of the membership on this list is 
impressive. If we invested half the time and money it takes to cope with 
industry standards that inherently do not serve our purposes, we could thrash 
out a consensus on the base hardware and software, implement it, replicate 
and distribute copies to the investing contributors, and kiss the monopolies, 
moving targets, etc. goodbye forever.

As one who has been exposed to endless sophistication in computer hardware 
and software design, I still value simplicity above all, and I presume this 
attitude is common among the list membership, otherwise why subscribe? The 
dialog is rife with examples that indicate that this is so.

What this world needs is a good $500 "toy" workstation-class Forth computer 
that preserves the elegant simplicity of the well-recognized niche of 
embedded Forth systems. To hell with "me too" reliance on off the shelf 
hardware. It is here today, gone tomorrow. Forget USB, PCI, FireWire etc. 
Think fibre optics or LVDS ring instead for peripheral and multiprocessor 
interfacing.

The axiom "never re-invent the wheel" is seductive, misleading, and 
hypocritical: the PC industry does it continuously and then presents us with 
the new world order! We wind up trying to cope with _someone else's_ wheel 
complete with broken spokes and eccentricity when it would be so much simpler 
to turn our own wheels on lathes that we also built ourselves.

Myron Plichota
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