December 2007 Meeting Notes

Compiled by Dave Jaffe

Contributions from Kevin Appert and others

09:45

Coffee and a Chat

10:20

Forth Day 2008 - Kevin Appert
Suggest a speaker or volunteer to speak!

10:30

What's Wrong with Forth Today? - Glen Haydon
Glen has seen the evolution of Forth since the days of the FIG-Forth model and has some comments on the twists and turns it's taken along the way.

The Importance of Living - Lin Yutang

12:00

Lunch
Some folks bring their lunch, some folks go to Togos.

13:15

The Object-Oriented Analysis of Morse Code to Text - John E. Harbold
John will present his very preliminary work (no PowerPoint slides), continuing with the Morse Code theme from Forth Day. The problem of translating Morse Code to text will be analyzed using the Executable UML method of Mellor & Balcer. The problem will be broken into manageable objects and the relationships between the individual objects. Objects can be passive or active. Passive objects are those that just have data and methods that access them. On the other hand, active objects have one state machine that responds to events. Only analysis - no design or implementation - will be discussed.

Executable UML - Book by Mellor & Balcer

Wikipedia entry for UML

14:00

Shannon Systems - Funds Transfer in Forth - Larry Miller
In 1986 Shannon Systems was a start-up doing a dial-up modem secure (encrypted) funds transfer system. This was a pretty ambitious project, and the software was entirely Forth-based. Two "Famous Forthers", whom old-timers will remember, Mitch Derick and Linda Baker, were major contributors to this project. Larry will describe the system and show videos from "Completion Day" and "Demo Day".

16:00

Adjourn

Other items:

Contact cleaner

BEI Precision Systems & Space Co. - uses Harris RTX Forth chips