The Evolution of CoSy

CoSy is the NoteComputing environment I have evolved with for general support in the business of life since meeting APL in the mid `70s . Current CoSy was constructed in old STSC flat PC-APL in 1984 as an open-source hypertext browser of its own objects -- altho that vocabuary was not yet in use . The target now is to rip the organs of Window95 ( OLEs ) open into a coherent linguistic structure down to the hardware - creating an environment providing the user/programmer complete control over their notebook computer . The practical next step is to integrate CoSy with a competitive APL language community and all the algorithms its members are interested in sharing . |FRI.MAY,970502,16:13-4| Cf : www.torontoapl.org/apl97/abs2.htm#p15

CoSy : Toward computer aided individual .

When Pascal was all the academic rage , I learned Algebra and APL : CoSy/Views/PsychoPhysics

Losing my tenure in grad school , there not being much of a market for undegreed mathematical psychophysicists , APL was my only mktable skill . I looked in the Chicago yellow pages and amazingly there were 3 companys listed : STSC , PCI and I.P.Sharp Associates . I was hired by JimRoyers of IPSA but was fired 13 days later for insubordination , specifically broadcasting a proposal to collect a workspace of PROFILE latent functions for environment initialization and email access rather than write yet another for the Chicago office .
My wife was not amused . Heading toward divorce , still with unlimited access to the university computing center , I spent nights trying to solve the drawing of n-dimensional cubes as a demo of Computer Aided Intelligence - an example of something perhaps not solvable other than with the Tool of Thought we call APL . See : CoSy/CoSyLogo

Eventually , I got a contract programmer job at Xerox in Rochester NY maintaining their world wide market forecasting system - APL by Cobol heads . It was at this time I named my business " Coherent " Systems in contradistinction to the masses of code I inherited . ( When the issue came up , I chose 'CoSy' as my e-mail name for IPSA`s mail system . ) I ended up rewriting the whole numerical data base system as an n-dimensional sparse array turning what took over night to compute into at most a couple of minutes . One problem with gaining wide acceptance for APL is that systems in APL are often too easy to create to think of spending the resources marketing .

CoSy started evolving during this life as consultant - spending most of the time programming , but needing to answer the phone and deal with business .
The evolution of CoSy from this period thru the mid `80s is discussed with pictures of some of the hardware in CoSy/Lang/Hardware .

The latter part of the `80s , and only finishing up now , my time got pretty much consumed by family matters commuting about half each month back to Chicago . It really was only starting in `87 that I gained a practical understanding of accounting and created the F5 execution functions to support the maintanance of ledgers . CoSy`s unmatched record keeping and general business capabilities were severely tested in courts during that period . The logic of IRS and Illinois Individual and Trust tax forms were also embedded in CoSy using the F5 functions and related extensions . These modeling capabilities are generalizations and simplifications of the mechanisms used for RG&E`s corporate model ( See CoSy/Lang/Hardware )
It would have been impossible to split my life like this without CoSy to carry it in .

The current state of my ideas on language is pretty well described in CoSy/Language/Ultimate presented at the 1994 Rochester FORTH conference .
See also CoSy/Language for further thoughts , and particularly CoSyGatheringų960204.Invite for an illustration of the sort of script environment I am heading toward .