jimm@amiga.UUCP (Jim Mackraz) (02/28/89)
--
Here's an interesting excerpt from the magazine "Embedded Systems Programming"
(A Miller Freeman Publication), vol 2 no 1, reprinted without permission.
From the column "When in ROM" by Ray Duncan, column titled "Of Rhealstone
and Real-Time," covering the the 1988 Real-Time Programming Convention in
Anaheim, California, Nov 18-19, 1988.
"The high point of the conference was the World's Fastest Programmer Contest
dreamed up by Martin Tracy, convention chairman and a senior programmer at Forth Inc.
The rules were simple and straightforward: contestants were allowed to bring a
computer and the programming language of their choice and could work individually or
in teams. Each was provided with a hardware device that could be interfaced to the
computer but whose nature wasn't known in advance. The object was to make the
gevice perform as described by the conference chairman; the first person to finish
would win $1,000.
"As it turned out, the hardware device for the contest--referred to hereafter as the
Gizmo--was nothing short of inspired. Though built from a handful of parts that
cost very little, it was an excellent challenge of the contestants' abilities to
write real-time control programs. The Gizmo consisted of a hacksaw blade mounted
vertically on a stand with a solenoid attached near the base and a seven-bar
Radio Shack LED on the free end. The solenoid was controlled by a two-transistor
complementary Darlington circuit, and the entire contraption was interfaced to the
host computer by a Centronics conenctor with one line driving the solenoid and five
others connected to the LED.
"When the solenoid was pulsed at appropriate intervals, the hacksaw blade would swing
back and forth at a constant rate like an upside-down pendulum. Text could then be
displayed and scrolled by turning the LED's bars on and off as it moved, taking
advantage of persistence of vision to form the illusion of characters. Finding the
resonant frequency of the hacksaw blade and the proper timings for the display
turned out to require quite a bit of interactive experimentation, for which Forth
is of course uniquely suited.
"The winners were Phil Burk and Michael Haas of Delta Research, who convinced their
Gizmo to scroll the message 'The Rain in Spain Falls Mainly on the Plain' in only
one hour and 20 minuetes. They used their own Forth interpreter/compiler, called
JForth, and an Amiga computer. Not bad pay for less than two hours' work, no matter
what kind of consulting rates you're used to! I hope that at next year's
convention we see even more contestants, a broader selection of programming
languages and computers, and another fascinating Gizmo to be programmed."
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I hope "Embedded Systems Programming" forgives my posting an excerpt from their
excellent magazine, and I also congratulate Mike and Phil on being the World's
Fastest Programmers. Only Amiga!
jimm
--
Jim Mackraz, I and I Computing "Like you said when we crawled down
{cbmvax,well,oliveb}!amiga!jimm from the trees: We're in transition."
- Gang of Four
Opinions are my own. Comments are not to be taken as Commodore official policy.