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STOIC (Stack-Oriented Interactive Compiler) was a variant of Forth. It started out at the MIT and Harvard Biomedical Engineering Centre in Boston, (part of the Health, Science and Technology Division) and was written in February 1977 by Jonathan Sachs
Jonathan Sachs

----Jonathan Sachs was the programmer who co-founded Lotus Software with Mitch Kapor in 1982 and created the first version of the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet program....
. Jonathan Sachs went on to be a co-founder of Lotus and wrote Lotus 123.

The original version was written on a NOVA minicomputer and cross-assembled for the 8080.






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STOIC (Stack-Oriented Interactive Compiler) was a variant of Forth. It started out at the MIT and Harvard Biomedical Engineering Centre in Boston, (part of the Health, Science and Technology Division) and was written in February 1977 by Jonathan Sachs
Jonathan Sachs

----Jonathan Sachs was the programmer who co-founded Lotus Software with Mitch Kapor in 1982 and created the first version of the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet program....
. Jonathan Sachs went on to be a co-founder of Lotus and wrote Lotus 123.

The original version was written on a NOVA minicomputer and cross-assembled for the 8080. STOIC came with its own primitive but effective file system, and could be booted up with little preliminary work on any 8080
Intel 8080

The Intel 8080 was an early microprocessor designed and manufactured by Intel. The 8-bit microprocessor was released in April 1974 running at 2 megahertz , and is generally considered to be the first truly usable microprocessor....
-based microprocessor
Microprocessor

A microprocessor incorporates most or all of the functions of a central processing unit on a single integrated circuit . The first microprocessors emerged in the early 1970s and were used for electronic calculators, using Binary-coded decimal arithmetic on 4-bit Word ....
 with 24K of memory and a teletype. After the source was released into the public domain, the system was subsequently modified to run under CP/M
CP/M

CP/M is an operating system originally created for Intel 8080/Intel 8085 based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research. Initially confined to single tasking on 8-bit processors and no more than 64 kilobytes of memory, later versions of CP/M added multi-user variations, and were migrated to 16-bit processors....
.

STOIC was said at the time 'to be conceptually similar to FORTH in the use of an extensible vocabulary of words'. . STOIC is actually a rational, and more consistent, dialect of FORTH. The system was remarkable at the time for having a built-in assembler, floating-point package, interrupt handler, and display editor (similar to the NOVA display editor). The source, and documentation, was distributed for many years by the CP/M Users Group.. As a practical development system, it compared favourably with contemporary implementations of FORTH, and went on to be used extensively for the development of applications. A portable version written in C was placed in the public domain and also distributed by the CP/M Users Group (UK)

Later it was ported to the DEC
Digital Equipment Corporation

Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering United States company in the computer industry. It is often referred to within the computing industry as DEC ....
 VAX
VAX

VAX was an instruction set architecture developed by Digital Equipment Corporation in the mid-1970s. A 32-bit complex instruction set computer ISA, it was designed to extend or replace DEC's various Programmed Data Processor ISAs....
 under VMS by Roger Hauck at Smithsonian Institution Astrophysical Observatory
Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory

The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory is a "research institute" of the Smithsonian Institution headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where it is joined with the Harvard College Observatory to form the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics ....
 (SAO) and was distributed by DECUS
DECUS

DECUS is an independent association of users of Hewlett-Packard and HP Partners. The membership association, registered in Munich, Germany, acts as part of the worldwide Association of Hewlett-Packard User Groups in Germany and Austria....
.

It was distributed at least through fall 1985.

STOIC, unlike other FORTH variants, was integrated with the VMS
OpenVMS

OpenVMS , previously known as VAX-11/VMS, VAX/VMS or VMS, is the name of a high-end computer server operating system that runs on the VAX and DEC Alpha families of computers, developed by Digital Equipment Corporation of Maynard, Massachusetts, Massachusetts , and most recently on Hewlett-Packard systems built around the In...
 I/O and system services rather than using the FORTH disk I/O. It also supported machine code (both inline and subroutine calls). STOIC supported double precision floating point operations using a stack.

Related programs

According to some mailing list comments,, STOIC was originally written by Jonathan Sachs in 1975. A different program named LSE was written by Robert Goeke, which incorporated some of the ideas of STOIC (and early versions may have been called STOIC).

An autotooled
GNU build system

The GNU build system, also known as the Autotools, is a suite of programming tools produced by the GNU project. These tools are designed to assist in making various source code Software package porting to many Unix-like systems....
 variant of LSE, , is maintained by John Doty.

See also

  • Red (text editor)
    Red (text editor)

    RED was a screen editor written in STOIC for use with VT100's in the early 1980's. It was designed to be efficient in an interactive environment....