THE FORTH SOURCE HISTORYMountain View Press was formed as The Forth Source by Roy Martin shortly after Martins and Associates took over the management of the Forth Interest Group over 17 years ago.
About ten years ago, Martins and Associates gave up the management of the Forth Interest Group but continued actively in its role as the Forth Source.
Original Product
In an effort to keep the spirit of the Forth Interest Group by placing the full source code in the public domain, they developed a Forth implementation based on the 79 Standard when that became available. Additional functions were added to completely support Leo Brodie's Starting Forth 1st Edition which was also based completely on the 79 Standard.
This product became known as MVP-Forth.
The kernel implementation went through several revisions, but has remained stable and unchanged since 1984. Later distributions have added application functions including those necessary to compile Forth Source code in files written by any word processor as well as in the original block format.
Supplementary Support
Supplementing the MVP-Forth implementations, The MVP-Forth Series of 10 volumes was develop an published over the years. These are individually listed in the Catalog.
Of particular interest was the FLOATING POINT AND QUAD PRECISION MATH, by Phil Koopman. This is a full package filling a gap in the early Forth implementations. It is the basis of the floating point package used in several commercial Forth products. In the spirit of the rest of Mountain View Press's products, the full source code including the values of all of the polynomials is included. A full high level Forth implementation is included as well as implementations to take advantage of specific processors.
Jack Park wrote theEXPERT SYSTEM. The full source code of this provides a model of an expert system. He has said that if you understand it you should as the question: Why did he do it that way? And then you would be on your own.
The remainder of the 10 volumes in the MVP-Forth Series are available each with the full source code to provide a model for others. These publications are in no way a substitute for the polished commercial products. Rather they provide a basis for student of the language and not so much applications.
Hardware Products
Mountain View Press also supported the development of WISC Technologie's WISC/16 and WISC/32 hardware implementations of Forth Engines. These were licensed to Harris Semiconductor for several years. When they gave up the entire line of their products, they returned all of the rights and the silicon versions of the WISC/32 to WISC Technologies.
Change of Ownership
About 7 years ago, Martins and Associates decided to sell The Forth Source with Mountain View Press to Epsilon Lyra, Inc. WISC Technologies and Mountain View press are now divisions of Epsilon Lyra, Inc. We continue the spirit of support of the Forth Comunity.
Recent Forth Developments
The internet has provided an excellent resource for Forth implementations and applications. Skip Carter, the newly elected president of the Forth Interest Group, operates a node which includes an archive of over 1820 files on Forth - www.taygeta.com You are encouraged to refer to this Web page for many Forth references.
CDROM Project
In the interest of making this archive of Forth files easily available, Rick VanNorman colleted these files on taygeta.com as The Forth Archive on a CDROM. Mountain View Press has the facilities and arranged with Rick VanNorman to produce and distribute copies of the CDROM. We plan to update the files available as seems appropriate.Future
Mountain View Press looks forward to continuing support of the Forth community. The Forth Archive CDROM is without annotation. This could provide a fertile field for users to organize and document the many files available. We would be happy to help publish printed documentation and to produce custom CDROMs for those looking for something to do.
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Mountain View Press Revised 29 November1997
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