Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!UTRCGW.UTC.COM!RAYBRO%UTRC
From: RAYBRO%UTRC@UTRCGW.UTC.COM ("William R Brohinsky", ay)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: RE: Feedback to the Forth Interest Group
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Date: 23 Jan 90 14:02:00 GMT
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With respect to E. Rather's 100K copies of Starting Forth:
I have three copies. I bought the first edition when it was quite young.
I recieved a second copy at work when I instigated the purchase of MVP
forth for Apple ][.  I got the second edition when it was fairly new,
about the same time that I got Thinking FOrth.

I hope the number of forth users/programmers will be estimated more on the
basis of systems sold (with a fudge factor for PD systems distributed freely
and home-brew systems as well...) and not on the number of copies of SF or
even TF (which at least gives an idea of how many forth programmers are
wanting to think...maybe!)

How about the other books on forth? Kelly/Spies (sp?), Mastering forth,
any number of other, lesser books. And how many of those books are
1) owned along with others by the same person
2) bought, perused, and consigned to book hell (i.e., never read nor
thought of again)
3) purchased by libraries (I believe the UTC system has one or two copies
of Starting Forth, which have been read or looked at by no-one knows how
many engineers, scientists, and technicians.
These factors make the numbers swing both ways. Good luck.

For a major application written in forth (which still has at least some
of a forth environment left to it) try Asyst! This is mostly for data
acquisition and allows some nifty processing of that data. It is used
enough at the research center, here, that we had Asyst come in and teach
a 3-day course on it.

-raybro