anderson@uwvax.ARPA (11/23/83)
Relay-Version:version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site duke.UUCP
Posting-Version:version B 2.10 5/3/83; site uwvax.ARPA
Path:duke!decvax!harpo!seismo!uwvax!anderson
Message-ID:<1158@uwvax.ARPA>
Date:Wed, 23-Nov-83 03:40:46 EST
Organization:U of Wisconsin CS Dept
The following two products for the Apple have been of con-
siderable utility to me:
1) Micromotion FORTH
This software product is a complete and unified programming
environment. It includes its own disk operating system
(crude, but easily extensible, as are most well-designed
things in FORTH), full-screen editor (full-screen, crude),
and FORTH compiler. Everything is memory-resident, and you
can get by easily with one disk drive. I believe the system
costs around $100 and for another $50 or so you can get
floating point support and high-resolution graphics utili-
ties, both of which are very complete and fast.
FORTH is not, as it stands, a dream language. But the debug
cycle is so fast in this system that you end up accomplish-
ing things at a far greater rate than you would in most oth-
ers. An added advantage is that you have absolute knowledge
of the guts of the system. This, for example, enabled me to
implemented multi-tasking capability with relative ease.
2) The Mill 6809 coprocessor (made by Stellation Two)
This board has a 1 MHz 6809E processor which shares the
Apple bus. When the 6809 is running it uses the DMA line to
put the 6502 on hold, for about 80% of the memory cycles.
The 6502 runs in the 6809's "dead" cycles. So, to some
extent, there is true shared-memory multiprocessing. The
6809 can be started and stopped, and either processor can
interrupt the other, under software control. You can get 3
different software packages: a PASCAL accelerator, a 6809
macro assembler (which I have, and highly recommend), and
the OS/9 operating system.
I used the Mill, and an EPROM programmer card, to write mon-
itor and BIOS ROMS for a homebrew 6809 system -- it was
extremely convenient. Another interesting use would be as a
dual-processor FORTH machine; using a table mechanism, one
copy of each FORTH word would suffice.
If anyone does or has done something interesting with these
or other Apple goodies, please mail me.
uwvax!anderson (David Anderson)