Please upvote Thomas's gf4 project

[Edward K. Ream]

Thomas gave me the grand tour of gf4 yesterday on zoom. It's an amazing project.

gf4 deserves to be widely recognized. If you agree, please click on the "Starred" button in the upper right.

Edward

[tbp1...@gmail.com]

Thanks, Edward, for the kind words!

BTW, in our zoom meeting I mentioned that the original GUI version, which I called "GF2" was written in Turbo Pascal as a DOS graphics mode program.  For those who don't remember, DOS graphics mode had a resolution of 320 X 200, and those few pixels took up the whole screen.  Talk about blocky!  The old binary will still run, even today, in a DOS emulator such as DOSBOX!

[Edward K. Ream]

On Sat, Jun 4, 2022 at 4:42 PM tbp1...@gmail.com <tbp1...@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks, Edward, for the kind words!

BTW, in our zoom meeting I mentioned that the original GUI version, which I called "GF2" was written in Turbo Pascal as a DOS graphics mode program.  For those who don't remember, DOS graphics mode had a resolution of 320 X 200, and those few pixels took up the whole screen.  Talk about blocky!  The old binary will still run, even today, in a DOS emulator such as DOSBOX!

:-)

Edward

[tbp1...@gmail.com]

I've added a link and screen shot to GF4 on my home page.

[Edward K. Ream]

On Sun, Jun 5, 2022 at 8:51 AM tbp1...@gmail.com <tbp1...@gmail.com> wrote:

I've added a link and screen shot to GF4 on my home page.

A suggestion: Announce gf4 on the python announcements list. I would add links to the gf4 repo and your home page.

Edward

[tbp1...@gmail.com]

I sent this to Edward, who asked me to repost it here.  It's about screen shots of the old ancestor to GF4, still running in a DOSBOX virtual DOS machine.  As a reminder, back then DOS graphics mode had a resolution of 320 X 200 pixels across the screen.

 "Just for laughs, here is a screen shot of the old version running in DOSBOX.  It's called "gstat" here instead of "gf2" because I had two versions with a somewhat different but overlapping set of functions in each.  Gstat had curve smoothing, gf2 had the FFT routine. By "old" I'm talking circa 1990.

Notice the noisy damped sine wave, just like we created in our Zoom tour of gf4.  The gf2 screen shot shows a log-log view of the FFT of the damped sine wave, again just as we did in our tour.

Back then I didn't have the button window.  All functions except the curve generators were dispatched from menus, most with keyboard accelerators.  I couldn't afford the screen real estate for a button window! - although my windows manager would have had no trouble supporting one.  The curve generation panel could be disappeared to make more room for the curve.

As I mentioned during our tour, the upper and lower scale labels on the vertical axis were actually calculator boxes if clicked on. Gf4 doesn't have that! The label "random noise" was generated by the program and would become the file name if the curve were saved.  The label is a clickable single-line edit box.

All graphics elements on the screen except for graphics primitives were provided by my windows manager.  The font was an 8 X 8 pixel fixed width font provided by the TurboPascal graphics package.

The half-tone effect in the background was a texture provided by the TurboPascal graphics package.  I found I liked it a lot and made it the default, though it seems unconventional today (I still like it, though).

Not gf4, but a recognizable ancestor. "

[Edward K. Ream]

On Tuesday, June 7, 2022 at 10:27:29 AM UTC-5 tbp1...@gmail.com wrote:

I sent this to Edward, who asked me to repost it here.  It's about screen shots of the old ancestor to GF4, still running in a DOSBOX virtual DOS machine.

Here is a copy of my private reply to Thomas:

QQQ

Youngsters have no idea what programming life was like in the "horse and buggy" days 40 or 50 years ago:

- Feeble hardware.

- Feeble programming tools: We worked in assembler or C.

  No git, python, numpy, matplotlib and leo.

- No internet! No google, github and online communities!

QQQ

40 or 50 years ago the challenges were way different, but we had the same kind of engineering fun seeing what was possible.

Edward

[David Szent-Györgyi]

Youngsters have no idea what programming life was like in the "horse and buggy" days 40 or 50 years ago:

- Feeble hardware.

- Feeble programming tools: We worked in assembler or C.

  No git, python, numpy, matplotlib and leo.

- No internet! No google, github and online communities!

QQQ

40 or 50 years ago the challenges were way different, but we had the same kind of engineering fun seeing what was possible.

In 1980 I was briefly involved in a project aimed at writing software to help in learning or reviewing trigonometry. The software was to run on the Atari 800 microcomputer, which offered sophisticated graphics for video displays, supporting mixing of text and graphics and offering hardware support for overlay of sprites along with hardware for detection of collisions between sprites and the rest of the displayed field. All that relied on custom chips built to run alongside the computer's 6502 microprocessor; controlling it required careful programming. The machine featured a maximum of 48 KB of RAM and a floppy disk drive.

The project's software was written in Forth, which provided a programming language, use of assembly language when needed, and a development environment that could fit on so small a machine. Forth had for many years an important niche in industrial control and embedded computing. 

Links of interest: 
Forth (programming language), on Wikipedia. 

Gforth, GNU Project's implementation

Win32Forth

Documentation and books

Gforth user manual

Starting Forth, by Leo Brodie, updated in 2003 by FORTH, Inc. 

Thinking Forth: A Language and Philosophy for Solving Problems, by Leo Brodie 

[tbp1...@gmail.com]

I've just done this.  Gulp!

[Edward K. Ream]

On Tue, Aug 23, 2022 at 10:42 AM tbp1...@gmail.com <tbp1...@gmail.com> wrote:

I've just done this.  Gulp!

Good for you. Good for the world :-)

Edward