LMI Forths

[Chuck Jackson]

Hi all,

After LOTS of google-ating for a few days, I've found that at LEAST some of LMI's products could be "given out".

I can't find much that concretely says which ones "are free" and I absolutely can't find any downloads of such products online anywhere.

I'm mostly interested in older MS-DOS versions but any version might be interesting.

Does anyone here know for certain that any of these can be obtained? Maybe even have a link for where to find them?

Thanks

[Hugh Aguilar]

All of LMI's products are proprietary. They can not be "given out."

The only exception is found here: http://www.forth.org/compilers.html
We have LMI WinForth v1.01 that appears to be a free version of UR/Forth.
This only worked on some early version of Windows (Windows-95). It doesn't work now.
I tried it many years ago and it appeared to be UR/Forth, except running under Windows.

In some cases, Ray Duncan (LMI President) sold or gave the source-code to UR/Forth
to certain people, but he made them sign NDA statements.
Testra has the UR/Forth source-code and they have upgraded it to run on the modern
Windows OS. They spent a lot of money on this so they could keep old UR/Forth software
(including my MFX) from the early 1990s running for decades after LMI went out of business.
Don't expect anybody who is still using UR/Forth to "give out" a copy. The NDA is still in effect.

[dxforth]

LMI no longer exists. Who's policing the NDA? If anyone owns LMI's IP and
wants to enforce it they should make themselves known. That God left it to
self-appointed vigilantes to make himself known was also a mistake :)

[Jurgen Pitaske]

https://www.linkedin.com/in/raygduncan/
He seems to do completely different things now.
I would be surprised if he has not stated somewhere what should happen to his LMI products..
Dennis Ruffer and Leon Wagner are connections, so they could easily find out.

[dxforth]

Perhaps so but what's in it for them? Same for former commercial customers of LMI.
At this point of time it's only of interest to hobbyists and from their perspective
it's been abandoned for 25 years. As for Ray, he posted the following in 2012 which
one may interpret as one pleases:

http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/forth-archive.html

[Hugh Aguilar]

I haven't forgotten about how you were mocking me by using the word 'disambiguifier'
for some kindergarten-level code that you wrote. Don't expect me to ever reply to you
except to remind you that you are on my twit list forever because of that.

All of these self-proclaimed Forth experts on comp.lang.forth are carrion eaters.
They can't program in Forth.
They desire only to steal somebody else's intellectual property --- in this case: UR/Forth.

[Hugh Aguilar]

Bullshit!
Back in the day, UR/Forth was the de-facto standard for Forth.
Anybody who claimed to be a Forth programmer needed knowledge of URForth.
My job interview at Testra mostly involved proving that I had carnal knowledge of UR/Forth.
At that time, PolyForth from Forth Inc. was an amatuerish pile of crap roughly comparable
to a $20 shareware Forth in terms of technical quality. PolyForth was limited to 64KB for
the application program, the compiler and the headers --- it was an unfunny joke.

So, why do you think that Ray Duncan has any respect for Forth Inc. dweebs such as
Dennis Ruffer or Leon Wagner? Anybody who would work for Elizabeth Rather
is a brown-noser --- really nothing more than a pissant with no technical skill whatsoever.

[Jurgen Pitaske]

Here you really show again how ugly your personality is.

I just mentioned these names and the link https://www.linkedin.com/in/raygduncan/
as it might be able to help others who have an issue - I definitely do not have one.
Dennis and Leon still have Forth projects - you better stick to your plumbing.
People with an issue will definitely try to solve it and contact them
- whatever you think about them -
and they will not know of your wisdom anyway.

And you can stick you long nose into anybody's back when brown-nosing.
Actually with all the lies you are telling here , you are like Pinocchio - must be an interesting experience. - your brown-nosing

And even regarding MFX the truth comes out slowly now.

Testra exactly knew what they wanted as you state yourself - so you only implemented it.
I now wonder, how much is actuallyy your work.
But I do not care anyway, as this is one generation back.
Custom for Testra, so nobody has acess to judge / comment one way or the other.
Irrelevant for the rest of the community now.
Just stop mentioning it.

[dxforth]

On 20/07/2021 22:48, Hugh Aguilar wrote:
>
> All of these self-proclaimed Forth experts on comp.lang.forth are carrion eaters.
> They can't program in Forth.
> They desire only to steal somebody else's intellectual property --- in this case: UR/Forth.
>

Carrion eater: One that consumes another's intellectual property to inflate himself.

[Hugh Aguilar]

On Wednesday, July 21, 2021 at 2:31:29 AM UTC-7, jpit...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Wednesday, 21 July 2021 at 09:05:53 UTC+1, Hugh Aguilar wrote:
> > Back in the day, UR/Forth was the de-facto standard for Forth.

...

> Dennis and Leon still have Forth projects - you better stick to your plumbing.

Forth Inc. killed Forth with their ANS-Forth marketing gimmick.
In the early 1990s, Forth was still considered to be a viable programming language,
primarily due to UR/Forth, although there were other Forth systems capable
of commercial programming.
PolyForth was worthless crap. After Charles Moore got kicked out of Forth Inc.
there were no more programmers at Forth Inc. but only sales clowns and
maintenance programmers who lived off of the "Forth Inc." name that made it
seem as if they owned Forth despite the fact that the inventor of Forth was gone.
The primary purpose of making ANS-Forth the "Standard" (capital 'S') was to make
UR/Forth non-standard by fiat --- nobody could be a Forth programmer without
brown-nosing Elizabeth Rather --- that was the purpose of ANS-Forth!
When UR/Forth was killed there was a mass exodus of programmers from Forth to C.
A few people continued to use Forth --- Testra was either given or (more likely) purchased
the source-code to UR/Forth so they could continue, keeping all of their legacy Forth code
running (Testra continues to rely on my MFX written in UR/Forth for over 1/4 century).

Your claim that UR/Forth is some crap code that can be given away for free is an insult
to real Forth programmers who continue to rely on UR/Forth.
I would not have been able to write MFX in PolyForth --- I needed a real Forth system,
not a toy, to write a cross-compiler like that --- this is how progress is made, and MFX
was progressive (nothing like this had ever been done before).

> And even regarding MFX the truth comes out slowly now.
>
> Testra exactly knew what they wanted as you state yourself - so you only implemented it.
> I now wonder, how much is actuallyy your work.

You are a liar!
I have said many times that I designed MFX as well as wrote it:

On Tuesday, July 20, 2021 at 11:01:11 PM UTC-7, Hugh Aguilar wrote:
> When I worked at Testra I was given the job of doing something that had never
> been done before, which is write an assembler for a VLIW processor. It was my
> idea for the assembler to do the out-of-ordering of the instructions. John Hart
> had said to make the assembler source-code have rows representing opcodes
> and columns representing fields in the opcodes that are executed in parallel
> (one clock cycle per opcode), and have the assembly-language programmer
> write his program in this two-dimensional manner --- humans can't figure this
> out in their head though --- humans think sequentially (one-dimensional).

[Jurgen Pitaske]

Copy and paste from the other posts

Well, I do not really think so - you are not fond of what you did then.
This is not what I call fond.

There is just another twist from yesterday.
His post here was so bad - I sent it to Tom Hart at Testra for information,
not expecting a feedback.
I basically got it by return.
Stating, that Hugh sends hate emails.
If he does this with all of his ex-employers,
the amount of re-hires will be minimal.
But it shows he behaves in the same way in any direction.
He must be really disturbed.
Is there no help?

[Dennis Ruffer]

There is no help for Hugh. Why even bother trying?

DaR