Re: Z80 CP/M Forth & loading code from disk

On Sat, 22 Mar 2008, Bruce McFarling wrote:

>
>
> On Mar 21, 3:15 pm, Duke Normandin <dukeofp...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> > I see! So if I'm going to play with a native Forth, I had better
dedicate
> > an entire box to it just to be safe. ;)
>
> That's one approach ... but also remember that a lot of 70's era "the
> rest is left as an exercise to the reader" code ends up meaning that
> the rest was never actually done. If you have an old fa****oned raw-
> blocks Forth, and it only knows about the floppy disk drive at the
> outset, and you never put in the code to let it know about the hard
> drive, its never going to know that its there.

I was thinking more along the lines of one of Albert Van der Horst's
native Forths.

> ...
> > Got it! So originally, this was true of Forth and more-or-less all the
> > hardware that it ran on ;) Iotas of RAM and not much better mass
storage.
> > So you had to find ways to cut "costs" like crazy!
>
> "Originally" it ran on minicomputers, back when minicomputers had less
> processing power than we would expect to find in a good personal
> printer today. Hence the strong emphasis on multi-tasking.
>
> But the big proliferation of public domain implementations in the
> early days of the microcomputer revolution was almost always trying to
> doing a lot in what we would see today as a tiny smidgen of space. I
> spent $1,000 to get a Commodore 64 with 94K of memory (64K RAM, 8K
> BIOS ROM, 8K Basic ROM, 4K character ROM) and a 6502 1Mhz processor,
> plus a 5.25" disk drive with 170K capacity on a plug and play serial
> daisychain interface where Commodore had either specified the protocol
> wrong or build their interface chip wrong so that it couldn't be run
> on serial hardware but had to be bit-banged at glacially slow speed.

I bought my first computer in 1981/82 ?? An Apple ][e clone from Taiwan.
It s****ted dual CPUs -- a 6502 and a Z80. I ran CP/M as well. I wish that
I had heard of Forth back then. I'm told that there even was a FIG here in
Calgary ;( Maybe it just that I was too interested in playing LodeRunner!
:))
-- 
Duke Normandin
dukeofperl@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?