Category Archives: Uncategorized

This week I have been working on my tiny, Forth-like language SIMPL.  in a few hours of spare time I have managed to optimise some of the routines and get the code size down from around 900 bytes to just … Continue reading →

Some of you will know that I am a proponent of minimal computing devices. I have more than a passing interest in retro-computing, because after all, back in the day, hardware cost so much, – for example in 1963, in … Continue reading →

SIMPL SIMPL is a character interpreter running within a loop – in pseudocode: NEXT:             Fetch next Character (VM Instruction) from buffer                          Decode … Continue reading →

SIMPL – a small Forth Like Language Charles (Chuck) Moore, the inventor of the Forth computer language is one of my all time computing heroes. In a life long career in computing, starting in the early 1950’s – he has been … Continue reading →

The simple load-store architecture of the “Hack” computer featured in the NAND to Tetris course is worth of revisiting. Some years ago I created a bitslice design using 2 input NAND gates to handle just one bit of the design. … Continue reading →

In my exploration of minimal instruction set (MISC) cpus, it is often a worthwhile exercise to define the instruction set and then simulate the behaviour of the cpu in software. This can be done relatively straightforwardly using even a humble … Continue reading →

I have written a lot about SIMPL over the years, but it is my conviction that it has uses as a tool to help bootstrap various novel processors – and to ease the early stages of processor code development.  It’s … Continue reading →