August 2026
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 on MeetUp

SVFIG YouTube Channel

Zoom Chat     Screenshot

09:29

Start of the Meeting - Kevin Appert, SVFIG Program Chairman

09:30

Announcements - Kevin Appert, SVFIG Program Chairman

  • Where to recycle old computers?
  • Justin Kendrick's September talk - Hen Forth
  • Curtis Jones - APL Bay Area User's Group

09:35

Bootstrapping Delta AGI using Delta AI – Why Frontier AIs are Nice but Not Essential - Liang Ng
"I will investigate a minimalist approach to artificial intelligence by making use of entry level AI (free AI services provided by major AI platforms and llama.cpp) to construct Forth stack machine programs to cover 'everything', starting from sending public key encrypted messages to a decentralised forum of AI shared conversations, and derive an alternative theoretical framework for AGI.”

10:090

Screenshot

10:10

Finances in Forth - Andrew McKewan
"I'll show how I’m using Forth on a Jupyter Notebook - instead of a spreadsheet - to plan my retirement finances."

10:27

Rethinking Error Handling: It's Influence on Memory Management - Nelo Mitranim
Description:

  • Reinventing error handling by learning from many languages.
  • Making error-value-passing truly ergonomic.
  • How errors influence language design and memory management.
  • Avoiding core mistakes in errors and memory management.

Here is an outline of Nelo's presentation:

  • Error handling design: memory management corollaries
  • Error designs fail differently
  • Exceptions have to be fought
  • Desired error-handling properties
  • Plain return: granular handling
  • Each function chooses its error granularity
  • No catch: simply skip try
  • Static and dynamic errors share one channel
  • Powerful allocator interface
  • Each thread carries an ambient program context
  • Spawn transfers arena usage: join returns it
  • Region memory management vs GC: same ease, less machinery
  • Error handling design: pick all

11:04

The 2026 Vintage Computer Festival West - Dave Jaffe & Kevin Appert
"Kevin & I will present a photo review of the exhibits at this year's West Coast Vintage Computer Festival."

11:27

Falvo Update - Samuel A. Falvo II
"I'll give a very short update on what I've been up to lately. I have created a YouTube playlist dedicated to the Kestrel."

11:46

CoSy Update - Bob Armstrong

  • "The target market is human - even women."
  • "CoSy is based on Reva Forth."
Video (14:39)

12:00

End of the Meeting

September

The Hen Language: An Experiment in Reinterpretive Programming - Justin Kendrick
"Classically, Forth application writing typically starts with primitives combining them into higher- level words, and using those words to construct a program. But I often want to factor in the opposite direction: run the same high-level program, but swap out the interpretations of the words. Hen is an experiment in adding this capability to Forth. It leads to some interesting patterns, and avoids the boilerplate of dependency injection in C++ and the complexity of monad transformers in Haskell."

Future

CoSy Update - Bob Armstring
"I can talk on progress toward eclipsing the trade computing environments with Forth CoSy for the ultimate target market of female entrepreneurs who consistently compare CoSy with Evernote and Notion, both of which have ~ $B valuations after a couple of $100m investments. But both don't have the radically open foundation provided by Forth. (Notion does evolve from SmallTalk.) "

Automatic Differentiation in Forth - Brad Nelson
"I'll explore using Forth Recognizers to implement automatic differentiation and explore differential programming."

Forth Recognizers in SwiftForth
Automatic Differentiation
Differentiable Programming

Windows Shell Support in Win32Forth - Bill Ragsdale
Bill will examine the three levels of direct user's Forth interface to a Windows based PC.

Creole Forth and Picar-X, Part 2 - Joseph M. O'Connor
Joseph will continue his presentation of Creole Forth for Python which he used to develop commands for the Picar-X robotic car.

Smart Token System - Don Golding
Don will discuss a combination of Color Forth constructs: a packet like structure for the cell.

Getting Started with arrayForth - Greg Bailey
"I will present a video on the simple process of downloading, installing, and using arrayForth 3."

Direction Finding - Andrew Korsak
Andy is planning to present this application.

Building GUIs in Forth, without the Gunk - Xuyang Chen

Fiji - Jack J. Woehr
Fiji
Fiji Language

The Game of Bridgit - Bob Armstrong

Other Items:

Forth for MSP430
Forth Tutorials
Forth CPUs
Forth Articles and Blogs
Forth Programming Books
Forth Jobs - submitted by Dennis Ruffer
Other Jobs
Green Arrays
Forth People
Products in Forth
Misc Forth Stuff
Computers
ESP32 Starter Pack
Components
Software Applications
Space Applications
Space stuff
Programming Languages other than Forth
Operating Systems
Utilities
Hardware
Other Books and Magazines
Manuals & Documentation
Articles
August 1980 Byte Magazine - The Forth Language
Applications
Stores
Robots
Games
Companies
Lectures
People
Surplus Houses
Meetings
Courses
Trade Shows
Podcasts
Personal Computer History
Remembering RS-232
Celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Iconic Zilog Z80
When Did the Zilog Z80 First Appear in Electronic Design?
Retro Computing
Simulated Pickett N600-ES Slide Rule
Tutorials
Education
Contests
Blogs
Other
The Magnetophon Tape Recorder Changed Radio Forever

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