[NOSC] Chuck Moore website and new Forth chips

[Jeff Fox <fox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Eric Laforest wrote:
> Actually, is he planning to release the sources 
> to his ColorForth/OKAD II
> systems on this site?

ColorForth will get source and object files soon.

CAD will get tutorials, examples and component
libraries since the links are there but no files yet.

As to the full five hundred lines of source to OKAD II 
and the full source to the chips themselves that is 
something else. He has wanted to get paid something 
for the twenty years of work he has invested into
chip designs mostly without pay.  Chuck is past
a reasonable retirement age given his family history.

He has discussed his option to put the CAD and 
chip sources into the public domain.  That might 
be a last ditch attempt to get someone to pay for 
consulting work.  But he has no hard plans to do that
at the moment.  Personally I think it is a lot
to ask. I think it would have more negatives than
positives.

One problem I see with that is the one of
where that would lead.  The main interest so far
has not been from "talking chinese doll makers" as
someone wrote in one of the other mail lists.
The chips may just end up as weapons anyway but
it has been an issue.

There was an interesting story on the news 
yestersay about Fort Lauderdale Florida where 
the police have many survelance cameras around
town connected to a computer with face recognition 
software that do criminal records searches on 
people in a crowd. If you make the cost, size, and 
power consumption of that sort of technology zero 
you enable not just big brother but things like smart 
bullets and human hunting robots which are seriously
funded projects that have wanted these chips.  And like 
I have said many times, I have many stories from the 
last ten years.  It gives another reading to the
popular advice that we need to find a "killer app."

The idea of truely inexpensive computers with 
reasonable software that could enable and educate
more than 2% of the world's population seems to of 
no interest to anyone.  Most people in the lucrative 
computer industry prefer the shell game with the 
highest profit margins and are opposed in every way 
to that idea.  Some people who should know better do 
all they can to trivialize and distort what Chuck has 
done in order to protect their investments in time,
money, and skills in conventional computer technology.

Very few people have invested time, money, or
skills in support of what Chuck has tried to do.
Most fans have only provided lip service and only
to other fans.  I must admit that I expected
some support from the Forth community rather than
have them be the most opposed group and the most 
threatened by Chuck's ideas (ideas that are not 
already at least twenty years old that is. ;-)

One nice thing about Chuck getting his own website
is that I could more easily get out of the loop
altogether and avoid the kill (meaning insult, distort,
trivialize, demonize, name call etc.) the messenger
syndrome that has characterized the last decade
where I was the only person making information public
on this stuff.
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