Prompted by Garth's recollection:
Garth wrote:
Regarding speed of the Apple II: There was a Forth engine plug-in board that would have been cool to try. I was looking at a programming magazine from 1982 and came across an ad for MicroSpeed for the Apple II. At the top it says in big letters, "TEST-FLY A $20 MILLION JET ON AN APPLE? YES. WITH MICROSPEED." It starts by saying,
At the Bethesda Naval Research Center, they've discovered the power of MicroSPEED. The Navy's engineers use this remarkable hardware/software combination to "fly" an advanced fighter aircraft in real time-- even making vertical landings on a simulated carrier deck. A "crash" is merely another learning experience, and an opportunity to modify the research aircraft-- inside the Apple-- to improve tomorrow's combat planes. Surprised that such a sophisticated task is possible on the Apple? So were the Navy's officials, and many others who have discovered THE MICROSPEED DIFFERENCE <snip> ...and incredible Forth extensibility <snip>
As I understand it, this was a 4MHz Forth-hardware (ie, stack computer) plug-in board for the Apple II, and the MicroSpeed software for it came on a single 5.25" floppy.
I found the advert at
https://archive.org/stream/Forth_Dimens ... h/bethesdaand it seems to me that the product, from Applied Analytics Inc., was a 6502 Forth for the AppleII, with an expansion card supplying the floating point capability, for $495. That card had an AMD Am9511 on it, running at 4MHz. It is stack-based, offering fixed-point operations at 16 and 32 bit widths and a 32 bit floating point format. Basic operations took hundreds of clock cycles, transcendental operations took thousands (up to 12000 for POW.) Lots more about that chip in the datasheet:
http://www.hartetechnologies.com/manual ... %20FPU.pdfand the algorithm details:
http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/comp ... etails.pdf(where we learn that the transcendental functions use up all of the 4-level stack for temporaries.)
For a user-friendly overview of the development of floating point coprocessors, see
http://www.cpushack.com/2010/09/23/arit ... n-and-now/There's a product announcement in the 24 Nov 1980 issue of Infoworld:
http://goo.gl/HgxFBYwhich says the product can do over 100 square root operations per second, speeds up development time by 2x, and is 6 to 60 times faster than the base Apple II.
Cheers
Ed
