Inventio Software

Specialist Instrumentation Design and Programming

Inventio Software Ltd, Bracknell, Berkshire, UK

(+44) 01344 220088 Mobile 07954 580 833

email : howerd (at) inventio (dot) co (dot) uk

Inventio Software Ltd - registered as a computer consultancy in the UK since 1985, and as a limited liability company 2000 Jul 07

Howerd Oakford specialises in real-time, embedded, Internet enabled programming where program size, speed or reliability are critical. Also the hardware to run it on - micro-controller instrumentation and system design. Click here for my CV ,or download it in Word format.

Inventio is Latin for "discovery". Software is the part of a computer that you can't break with a hammer.

Howerd Oakford's personal page - everything you may not want to know about me...

This Web Site was last updated on 2009 May 15

2001 Sep 11 ’Tis the times’ plague, when madmen lead the blind. - William Shakespeare, King Lear 2005 Jul 7

Inventio Software Ltd

Technical Director : Howerd Oakford Company Secretary : Rod Oakford

Company No. 04029064 VAT No. GB 413-8462-59

Delivery Address : Inventio Software Ltd, No.1 New Villas, ( Junction with Rectory Lane ), Bracknell, Berkshire RG12 7EG, UK

Registered Office : c/o Avalon Accounting, Equity House, 4-6 School Road, Tilehurst, Reading, Berkshire RG31 5AL, UK

Latest News

cf2009may15 New easy to use floppy disk writer! View the readme file here

Full assembler source files, MASM assembler, colorForth source and DOS batch file to create the colorForth image, plus floppy.com to download it to a floppy disc :

Zip file cf2009may15.zip and self-extracting zip file cf2009may15.exe

Quick start guide

Run cf2009may15.exe and follow the instructions

Put a blank, formatted floppy disk in the floppy drive and double click on "go.bat"

This will create a bootable colorForth floppy disk

Reboot your computer with the floppy in the drive

You may need to adjust your BIOS settings to get the floppy to boot -

please see http://www.inventio.co.uk/getbios.htm from http://www.inventio.co.uk/cfdos.htm for how to do this...

Note : this version requires a built-in floppy drive - it will not work from an external USB drive

The PC must have an AGP graphics card and at least 32M bytes of RAM.

Text

My thoughts on Forth

My EuroForth papers collected together here :

2003 The colorForth Magenta Variable an emergent property of a new programming environment

2003 Three Forths Make a Hole how Forth made the extremely difficult happen

2001 colorForth and the Art of the Impossible the title says it all

2000 The Point to Point Protocol in Forth Hayes, PPP, IP, UDP, IPCP for 16 bit micros

1998 Multiple Language Programs Made Easy what you can do with a simple compiler

1997 Forth : Past, Present and Future an attempt to understand Forth

Forth and Not C (why you shouldn't use Forth ;)

Forth Versus C (why you should use Forth ;)

Token-based Programming for Compact Code getting the most out of the Atmel 89C2051

Software - The following are available for free download!!!

Some of my software tools - I hope they are useful...

Software Algorithms - ANS Forth for 32 bit PC Forths, mostly mathematical, also Windows Sockets API wsa.f , I hope you find them useful!

PCIdev PCI device viewer. Even works under WinXP/2K/NT (with some help!) This program may be of special interest to potential colorForth users to debug troublesome hardware...

PPP.com is a DOS based program to analyse, display and create PPP and Internet protocols. PPP.com is the current evolution of a general purpose scripting environment, adapted to the Point to Point Protocol. Currently it can open a PPP connection to an ISP and send DNS, ICMP, UDP or TCP packets to any IP address on the Internet. PPP.com has not been optimised for program size, as it is a 16 bit Forth program, and nearly fills up the maximum 63K bytes allowed for a .com program. This includes 4K of help text, roughly 3K of protocol descriptor text, an editor, 8086 assembler and Forth compiler. It supports five tasks, two of which monitor PPP and IP packets on each of COM1 and COM2 serial ports. It is programmed in a 16 bit DOS 8086 Forth to allow easy porting to 8 or 16 bit embedded processors.

Cweed is a C source file weeded and scanner. It only changes whitespace (formatting) and does not otherwise change the content of the file. This is analogous to weeding a garden, where the plants are left untouched but the bits between may be seriously modified. Cweed is an experiment in specifying a coding standard in the form of an executable program. Cweed is also useful for scanning a file for control characters, removing tabs, or just viewing what is actually there, not processed and formatted by an editor.

cfdos is a DOS program to display colorForth pre-parsed source blocks. This program will work on any computer that runs or emulates DOS, and allows you to view colorForth source, in both normal and "colour blind" mode. It features a file listing utility (F6) which displays all files of type *.BLK in the same directory, and can copy them to a formatted floppy disk. colorForth Explorer Edition is the latest colorForth stand-alone operating system, packaged together with a Windows/DOS program to display colorForth source and create bootable floppy disks.

cf2009may15.exe full assembler and source files, MASM assembler, colorForth source and DOS batch file to create the colorForth image, plus floppy.com to download it to a floppy disc :

Zip file cf2009may15.zip and self-extracting zip file cf2009may15.exe

Don't be deceived by the fact that colorForth boots from a floppy - this is an experimental state-of-the-art operating system for a PC.

See The colorForth Magenta Variable and colorForth and the Art of the Impossible my first impressions of colorForth

Links

So you want to know more about Forth? Hint : when searching for Forth related material on the Internet, use “in Forth” as the string, as this excludes the use of the English word “forth” as in “back and forth”. E.g. Google for "in forth" tutorial

Forth Links

http://www.angelfire.com/in/zydenbos/WhatisForth.html (by R.J Zydenbos)

www.forth.com (Forth, Inc. , ANS Forth supplier)

http://www.mpeforth.com/ (MicroProcessor Engineering , ANS Forth supplier)

www.holonForth.com (HolonForth , HolonJ for Java, HolonX for XML - a novel database Forth/Java/XML environment)

FIG (the Forth Interest Group)

Forth Java applet (try out Forth online!)

Forth Underview (by Peter Knaggs)

Why Forth (a personal view, very much the same as my own, from Brad Rodriguez)

Forth Books Online

http://home.iae.nl/users/mhx/sf0/sf0.html Starting Forth

http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/ Thinking Forth