January 2019 Meeting Notes

Compiled by Dave Jaffe

Contributions from Kevin Appert and others

SVFIG on Google+ Hangout: long url - tinyurl

SVFIG on Google+ - SVFIG on YouTube - SVFIG on YouTube Live

SVFIG YouTube Channel

Videos: morning (1:21:02) - afternoon (1:04:00)

08:00

Breakfast
We met up at the Peninsula Creamery, 900 High St., Palo Alto

10:00

Coffee and a Chat

10:30

ESP32Forth for the AI Robot - CH Ting
"The ESP8266 and ESP32 have 32-bit Xtensa cores, but I haven't seen any Xtensa assembly code or machine code examples. It has a strange 24-bit instruction set with some 16- bit narrowed instructions. I was able to force the Arduino IDE to spit out assembly and machine code from my espForth written in C. I hope to be able to write eForth in Xtensa assembly, but it is still not clear to me whether it is possible. These ESP chips are main frame computers in UNIX.”

Slides - 465 Kb pdf file

Getting Started with the ESP32 Development Board

11:30

Lunch
We enjoyed lunch at The Treehouse.

13:00

AI Robot Update - Dan Golding
Don will talk about his educational / hobby robot project.

14:00

Introduction to Quantum Computing for Software Engineers - Joeseph A. Latone, IBM Almaden Research Center
Joe will provide an overview to quantum computing for software engineers, citing useful references to help developers get started in this field. Topics will include QC's instruction set, programming model, complexity class, and software stack.

Quantum Links - bit.ly

16:00

Clean Up and Adjourn

Other items:

Forth

Forth for MSP430

Forth Tutorials

Forth CPUs

RTX2010 on Wikipedia

RTX2010 search

A simulator for the RTX2000 processor - Michael Schuldt

Forth Articles and Blogs

Forth Programming: Get Started

Charles Moore: From FORTH to Stack Processors and Beyond

ecma6-forth - Low level forth like language for experimenting with animation and graphics - Todd Thomas

Forth Programming Books

A Start With Forth 2017: Forth - Bits and Bites - Juergen Pintaske

Moving Forth - Internals and TTL Processor: Forth Internals - Brad Rodriguez

Forth Jobs - submitted by Dennis Ruffer

Other Jobs

Green Arrays

Forth People

Products in Forth

Misc Forth Stuff

Computers

Canon Cat Emulation

Canon Cat: Enabling Forth - Dwight Elvey

Canon Cat mailing list

Chips

Components

Software Applications

Space Applications

Apollo Guidance Computer sale highlights contrasting views of historical significance

The Computer That Took Man to the Moon

Programming Languages other than Forth

Operating Systems

Utilities

Hardware

Hardware Math for the 6502 Microprocessor - Ralph Kissel and James Currie

Other Books

Manuals & Documentation

Articles

Proposal: RPN as "super macro" for C/C++ code

Applications

Stores

Robots

Games

Companies

Lectures

People

Surplus Houses

Meetings

Videos

Forth spreadsheets - David Smith (video 1:12:16)

Courses

Trade Shows

Podcasts

Personal Computer History

Retro Computing

Tutorials

Education

Contests

Blogs

Other

The Untold Truth of the 'Mythbuster' Adam Savage (video 8:07)

Army Looks for a Few Good Robots, Sparks Industry Battle

Stephen Hawking AI Warning: Artificial Intelligence Could Destroy Civilization

A peek into IBM's quantum computing plans

quantum_yiqing - Jack Woehr

The Quantum Computing Talk (cartoon)

What’s All This eFlea Stuff, Anyhow?

UNIX Surplus

Hardware Math for the 6502 Microprocessor - Ralph Kissel and James Currie
"Forth would be much better than BASIC for most applications where maximum speed is not required. Pure assembly code squeezes an extra factor of 5 to 10 out of the hardware. With Forth, little or no assemby code would be needed."