Path: csiph.com!usenet.pasdenom.info!news.albasani.net!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!mx04.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Frank Thomason Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth Subject: Re: mr paysan where is your chip? Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2012 15:31:04 -0400 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 24 Message-ID: <507F0778.1050904@Thomason.com> References: <6bef0964-011f-4020-9d31-f7c887a52946@googlegroups.com> <4626464.gGs9T4UXBT@sunwukong.fritz.box> <51932083.Wq75TzlriR@sunwukong.fritz.box> <5582590.oV2Wc04zOP@sunwukong.fritz.box> <-YOdnXYjn_94ZOPNnZ2dnUVZ_qSdnZ2d@supernews.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Injection-Info: mx04.eternal-september.org; posting-host="a8805dc39f6c6e951dd3e49a310f8e6e"; logging-data="18777"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX19wGluYuBh1tU7lmMJNpikM76D4vFWADgg=" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:16.0) Gecko/20121010 Thunderbird/16.0.1 In-Reply-To: <-YOdnXYjn_94ZOPNnZ2dnUVZ_qSdnZ2d@supernews.com> Cancel-Lock: sha1:qWJVyf7nxWmlji2JnYFzY1IT58Y= Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.forth:16404 On 10/17/2012 2:33 PM, Elizabeth D. Rather wrote: > On 10/16/12 10:25 PM, Ed wrote: >> Elizabeth D. Rather wrote: >>> On 10/16/12 1:31 AM, Ed wrote: > > That depends on whether the decision to drop the RTX had anything to do > with Forth either way. Your last sentence is critical: to us, the RTX > was a "Forth chip". To Harris, it was "that new processor" and at the > time giving birth to a new processor wasn't something they were prepared > to support regardless of its features. If Forth had nothing to do with > the decision, it can hardly be considered a "failure of Forth". > I worked at Harris, on the RTX product, and I can verify that what Elizabeth says is basically correct. Harris' "official" microprocessor product was the CMOS version of Intel's 286; the RTX effort was considered a waste of resources. After the successful launch of the RTX2000, we approached management with a proposal for what would be needed to develop and support the 32-bit version of the RTX (Phil Koopman's design). Our code name for it was the BINAR (But It's Not An RTX), just to hide the project's origins. Management's response was very negative. That was the beginning of the end of the RTX development.