[TUHS] forth on early unix

[Rob Pike via TUHS]

I wrote a lot of forth as a student programming radio telescopes, often
inside the telescope base itself. That was a thing back then, much to my
surprise. The regexp implementation BWK has celebrated was likely rooted in
a similar thing I did one hot summer day baking underneath a dish, annoyed
at the difficulty of doing what I wanted to do. That version fit inside a
512-byte block (that was a forth thing back then), probably two or three
times over.

I survived forth.

-rob


On Mon, Sep 22, 2025 at 1:17 PM Larry McVoy via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

> Bruce Karsh made me write a lot of forth on a Masscomp.  Messed with me,
> he was good at that, I wrote more(1) in forth and he kept coming back with
> "can it go backwords?"  "Can you search?" etc.  I made a pretty good more
> clone in forth because of Bruce.  And if you don't know him, I was on a
> zoom memorial for him and there were two Turing Award winners on that
> zoom.  Bruce was somebody.  I felt like I did not deserve to be there.
>
> I'm still not a forth fan.  That said, the sun boot proms were in
> forth and there was some pretty cool forth in there.  It knew the VM
> structures, it knew sockets, it knew a lot.  I'm still not a forth fan
> but it was useful.
>
> On Sun, Sep 21, 2025 at 10:03:15PM -0500, Will Senn via TUHS wrote:
> > I'm doing forth exploring and am curious if there were forthen (is that
> even
> > a word?) on early versions of unix that folks remember using?
> >
> > Will
>
> --
> ---
> Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing
> http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat
>