From: "Richard Ozer" 
To: "Scott Berfield" , 
Reply-To: "Richard Ozer" 


At the Chabot Telescope Makers' workshop, the software that we use for
generating and printing Ronchi images, as well as reducing our Foucault
readings was written in Forth for the Macintosh.  It only runs on old Macs;
so we have a reserve collection of SE-30's running system 6.5.

I tried porting the code to a PC version of Forth without much success....
it was someone else's code.

As for Forth, I'm taking the Fifth.

RO

----- Original Message -----
From: "Scott Berfield" 
To: 
Sent: Monday, June 02, 2003 11:05 AM Subject: RE: ATM: Field Rotation and GoTo Scopes



 Wow - I haven't heard anyone even mention Forth in years. We used to
call it a write once, read never language. Powerful, compact, and totally
incomprehensible a day after you write the code. :)

Some of the most violent arguments I ever heard back in the 80's were over
Forth - proponents of the language tended to get a little, well - zealous
in its defense. It is a great language for doing embedded control
applications - as long as you never have to try to maintain someone else's
code.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-atm{at}shore.net [mailto:owner-atm{at}shore.net] On Behalf Of
Dwight K. Elvey
Sent: Monday, June 02, 2003 9:50 AM To: atm{at}shore.net
Subject: Re: ATM: Field Rotation and GoTo Scopes



Hi
 Also look at evaluation boards from the original manufactures.
These are usually cheaper than other SBC's. Another processor to look at is
the 80186/188's. These have been around for a long time but can be handy. I
have an evaluation board that was made by AMD ( we no longer make 186's ).
It comes with enough flash and RAM to easily meet the requirements of such
a system.
 For languages, you should also consider using Forth. Especially while
you are debugging things. Once you have your hardware up and running, you
may want to switch to something like C because of source availability. It
is quite easy to put a native Forth on most SBC's. This give one the
ability to interactively debug and work out algorithms. I've used this
language on all of the embedded applications I used to do at a previous
employer( actually two back ). I even did one project that I rewrote things
into C and still figured that I saved about a month on the project( a
customer requirement ). Later
Dwight

>From: "Emery Greg" 
>
>Tom:
>
>Your welcome to pass along my email to your friend - I am not working
>on it
now, but hopefully in a year or so :).
>
>In terms of cost, if a cheap laptop can be bought second hand from the
internet- the laptop and stepper interface via the parallel port is of the
same order of cost as the controller board or SBC.  If you are buying a new
laptop, microcontrollers or SBC is much cheaper.
>
>I just hate going to one of my clubs darksites and seeing a **&^%%!!!
>laptop
screen - even if it is in night vision mode.
>
>Jeff,
>
> I remember seeing the Rabbits.  The Motorola or Zilog seemed neet as
> well -
Basic or C language programming, in circuit EEPROM all via RS232. Doesn't
get more convenient than that :):)
>
>ttfn
>greg
>
---snip---

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