[pardner]

In early 80s when I was a wee nerd in college a gentleman named Ray who owned Laboratory Microsystems was nice enough to give a poor college kid a copy of his excellent Forth implementation for the then-nascent IBM PC.

I breadboarded a little EPROM programmer (driven by a parallel printer port with the programming code done in Forth because I couldn't afford a real one). Then breadboarded implemented a little Z80 system with a bunch of general purpose I/O and a Forth "OS" in EPROM.

Used that little setup as the basis for a number of projects, including a home alarm system with phone-based control plus voice synthesis phone-based alert calling (which a couple silicon valley VCs were gracious enough to take a meeting about).

Forth gave me wings. Despite it's reputation as a "write-only language". Good times.