(Quick response) please excuse me for skipping introductory…
(Quick response) please excuse me for skipping introductory small talk. Will attempt to amswer your question
before i re state the questions i asked in my second communication with you.
Reference material. Will take weeks to months to adaquately respond to your communication. Much appreciated you took the time to speak to me and be so civil. Thankyou kindly.
Here
so it's September 2018 and we are here today with Charles Moore the inventor of the fourth programming language and we're here in Edinburgh on the Firth of Forth overlooking the Forth Bridge which is a very nice and appropriate venue Oh welcome to Edinburgh Charles is it okay Chuck Chuck it's fine look this is my happy to be here excellent Chuck I thought because it's the 50th anniversary of Fort Lee is clearly a landmark it would be appropriate to go back to the beginning and do a kind of a retrospective interview take you back all the way back through the journey in your life that has been forth up to the up to the present day now hey I thought I'd begin if I may by taking you right back to the beginning and ask you when and where you were born where you come from in the United States I was born about a week ago in 1838 okay ninety nine thirty eight engraved in my memory in McKeesport Pennsylvania that's a suburb of Pittsburgh Wesch dreadful this wormhole with the steel industry of course because that was what pittsburgh was and then we moved to eerie eerie Pennsylvania on the beautiful Lake Erie which died and been reborn and then moved to Flint Michigan where I grew up okay so you were to go to school in Michigan graduate what sexual high school was in the news recently because of water problems and of course appearing about them I learned that there are two high schools now neither one of which is centralized schools so I guess a little way okay and what am I here at your your education totally little bit about you and went to MIT okay I was going to be a civil engineer and I got there and started taking courses and my calculus and decided I liked physics that's why I was gonna become a high energy physicist and nuclear physics was a topical subject at the time and there was a little article in a flip journal saying that I went to MIT to sunny unclear physics they had transposed the first two letters but eventually I got a Bachelor of physics from MIT then I went Stanford for a couple years before the mathematician because the part of physics that I liked was mathematics and that didn't pan out so well because I really was interested in computers this department was not the place for computers so where did your interesting computers become established at MIT products are going to Holland started NYC right I was kind of bored with my coursework so I got a part-time job at this miss omean Astrophysical Observatory Sao and they were in charge of boom watch which was going to attract the first subway optically and that got upstaged by the Russians who launched the satellite a year earlier that moon watch was an aesthetic scramble to try to track their satellites so it was this slight thickness it was 5758 right so I got a Giovanni a calculator to calculate I'm sorry positions for each of the observing stations and also I was calculating one of the other students from MIT pointed out that I could write a Fortran program that we do all this work for me so you're making the calculations by hand yes there was a freedom calculator that's all I did oh so did you know Fortran as a language prior to this or did the spark was ignited when your colleague mentioned this and you have to go away then for child in order to do it I wrote a Fortran manual and it started put your cards all without authorization when I finally got a program that could calculate these things I told my supervisor and it went up the chain of command and they said do it and so this was called ephemeris four and it was in early 1958 and produced reams of printed output some of which got total typed to the various stations that was a lot of fun of course it paid to have it with my grades I was working 40 hours a week instead of studying okay it was fun yes tell us a little bit about the computers that you were working on then that I suppose of service 58 computer that mi t-- got and the sodium was running at Harvard so there's a Harvard MIT cooperation and I was the IBM 709 which was upgraded to a celadon I know it was a thirty-six bit computer which is curious because half of 36 is 18 and my current computers are 18 bits all those are all servants this was a computer center where there was a glass wall to keep the spectators out of the computers and I got to go through the glass wall and actually hand my punch cards to the operator who would put them in a hopper and run the computer and eventually I got to put them in the hopper I've never got to push the buttons on the computer most of the days it was very informal like I can work third shift and get immediate turn around whereas othe…
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Uh, it is our custom that you introduce yourself and tell us who you are as if nobody knows who the hell you are. Go. >> Hi, I'm Greg Bailey. [clears throat] I work for Green Arrays, which was founded in 2009 on Friday the 13th of February by Chuck Moore and all of us who had been working with him for a fellow named Daniel E. Leone at a company called Intellysus. And when we were all laid off from there, we basically spun out with in fact no help at all from Intellysus in the process. I was going to make a couple of brief remarks uh before we run these videos. Uh first remarks are thanks for the opportunity to be here. Appreciate it. We've been here for a while obviously, but u this is a friendly environment. These are friendly folks here. Uh, I'd like to make a couple comments resonating first with what John Ryel reported about slurp. Uh, I also named my first fourth implementation flux f lux, which was an acronym for fourthlike language for unpretentious zero files. For the same [laughter] for the same reason that that John named his slurp, we were afraid. We were we didn't yet know that Elizabeth and Ned were human beings and so we were afraid of them. We're afraid of forth think. At any rate, that was misplaced fear. Chris Lzinski pointed out last year that some people had missed the fact that our computers do not have clocks as such. Chuck has the balls to design a computer with no clock. This is a thing that people generally are not ballsy enough to do. They were in the old days. In the 50s, there were clockless computers, but more recently, people put put clocks in their computers. And why are the clocks there? The function of a clock is to slow down the logic. If you actually look at the designs, you'll discover that is what they are for, is to slow down the logic. By having no clock, it's possible to let the logic run at full speed, which is a very advantageous thing to be able to do. Also, years ago, just to prove a point, I laid out a clock distribution …