Re: a Forth disk and Captain Crunch

[Charlie Springer <RAM@regnirps.com>]

On Sun, 4 Jun 2006 01:20:04 -0700, Michael J. Mahon wrote
(in article <-8mdnb6cNPQqCh_ZnZ2dnUVZ_uudnZ2d@comcast.com>):

> bieling@terra.es wrote:
>> In 1979 I went to the NCC in NYC.
>> There in a booth a man was showing a language called Forth that had
>> some
>> very nice features, among them, that you could define your own
>> commands,
>> and that it made good use of stacks, with commands like push, pop, dup,
>> swap, etc, something that I liked very much mainly because I was used
>> to
>> it because of my hp65 programmable calculator.
>> 
>> When I told him that I liked it and I wanted to buy, he took an empty
>> floppy, copied the "Forth System" on it (both sides), peeled off 2
>> stickers, and wrote by hand on the sticker:
>> 
>> "A Forth System, Apple II 24k, Ver 1.6 Copyright 1979 By John T. Draper
>> of CAP'N SOFTWARE"
>> 
>> He even gave me a signed business card.
>> 
>> I didn't know until today that...
>> John T. Draper is "Captain Crunch"...!
> 
> He wrote EasyWriter in his Forth.
> 
> -michael
> 
> Parallel computing for 8-bit Apple II's!
> Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/
> 
> "The wastebasket is our most important design
> tool--and it is seriously underused."

Are you sure it isn't a copy of MVP-Forth? He bought our Forth and the god 
Captain would pirate anything anywhere anytime. He used to call me in Palo 
Alto from Hawaii at 3:00 AM with questions, and other times use operator 
interrupts if I was on the phone with someone else, since he new every phone 
trick there is. You probably know he is famous for shaping a Cap'n Crunch 
serial box two tone toy whistle to produce the dual tone that disabled long 
distance billing. Thus his nickname.

I have a batch of MVP-Forth disks for Apple II in a zip-lock somewhere and 
copies of the user manual. Also MVP-Forth PADS (Professional Application 
Development System) and Meta-Compiler for Apple //.

-- Charlie Springer