On Thu, 19 Jan 2017, Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
On 01/19/2017 06:50 AM, Bob Flanders via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
Agreed. I wrote a system in FORTH that monitored equipment at various sites around the USA for MCI. It was used for about 15 year. ('85-'00).
Quick trivia question. Why was it named FORTH, not FOURTH?
A five-letter filename limitation, if memory serves.
-Dave
From "The Evolution of FORTH": "The name FORTH was intended to suggest software for the fourth (next) generation computers, which Moore saw as being characterized by distributed small computers. The operating system he used at the time restricted file names to five characters, so the 'U' was discarded. FORTH was spelled in upper case until the late 1970s because of the prevalence of upper-case-only I/O devices. The usage 'Forth' was generally adopted when lower case became widely available, because the word was not an acronym." https://www.forth.com/resources/forth-programming-language/#1_Chuck_Moore821... Mike Loewen mloewen@cpumagic.scol.pa.us Old Technology http://q7.neurotica.com/Oldtech/