George Shaw Welcome to the second issue of the SIGForth newsletter. This one is coming to you a bit late flike the first issue) beWORDS FROM cause we are experiencing some growing pains. Most notably, the loss of our THE e s t e e m e d Editor, Charles Curley. CHAIRMAN Charles recently got hitched and moved to a new job in Colorado; he would like to reallocate his available time fully to these worthwhile pursuits. We will have a new editor for our third issue, Paul Frenger, a medical doctor active in Forth and bioengineering for many years. That issue and those following should come out quarterly fi'om now on. complete the typesetting. We are reviewing other organizations for this and following issues. The firstissue was sent to ACM for publication the last week of April. The second issue's deadline was supposed to be mid-May to be sent for publication in June (this has obviously slipped a bit). We expect to keep a quarterly publication schedule, ff enough artides are submitted and funds permit i~ We have had a great deal of Rouble getting bills paid and receiving expense reimbursements. Out of about a dozen transactions, well over half have either been lost or delayed over 30 days at ACM's end. This needs to be solved. Vendors are not anxious to do business with you ff they know there will be Rouble getting paid. Help Wanted At the time I am writing this, I am at the X3J14 ANS Forth committee meetings in Boston, May 2-7. There is a report on this project elsewhere in this issue. We've made some veW good progress at this meeting. However, the other projects are lacking attention. Mostly mine. We need project leaders for them and I haven't had time to find people yet. Notably, the Success/Failure, Forthics and the State of the Industry Suivey projects need leaders. All of the projects need volunteers. Ifyou are interested in one of the projects, call the project leader or myself (ffthere is no leader yet). We also need to hear about Forth news for the News column, as well as calendar dates for the Calendar. Contacts for additional Forth vendors or Forth BBS's are of continuing interest also. We'll publish expansions to our lists in each issue, and make the entire lists available on request. We are actually in need ofvolunteers for all manner of activities. Some of these indude: ¢ Compiling survey results ¢ Delivering membership forms and call for papers to other conference sites ¢ Contacting prospective authors for articles ¢ Contacting prospective sponsors ¢ Working at SIGForth conferences to help with registration, etc. ¢ Contacting other members to find volunteers ¢ Participating in the activities of each of the projects ¢ Leading a major or minor project Your help is what makes this organization work. Some activities require as little as fifteen minutes ofyour time, others are continuing commitments. Ifyou are interested in helping, contact me; ifyou are called upon to volunteer, please do. Thanks! Annual Report During the first six months of our existence, our primary goals have been to publicize our existence, gain membership, hold our first conference and commence work on our projects. Our initial publidty campaign has been completed, though delays in typesetting and printing caused the conference publicity to go out very late. One of the primaDr mailing lists was not available, reducing membership gained by one to two hundred members. This list should be available on time this year, however. Acceptance of us by vendors and other Forth organizations has been very good. We expect additional publidty at minimal cost through these avenues. We held our first conference in February 1989. The conference went well, though we had fewer attendees than desired. This was primarily due to the lateness of the distn'bution of the call for papers. We are expecting to receive some late sponsorships which will help defer the cost of printing the proceedings. "Ihe conference currently has about a $1200 loss. We expect the conference, after sponsorships, to break even and possibly pay for the entire cost of printing the Proceedings. Conference chairmen have been selected and work has begun on SIGForth '90 (Dallas) and SIGForth'91 (Houston). The response to our First Annual Industry Survey has been good, with over 240 responses received. These have all been entered into a PC so the data can be best analyzed. We expect to do a mailing soon to the respondents regarding their interests indicated on the survey. We have a project leader for the Education project and ANS Forth project. We are seeking leaders for the other projects. We hope to find them when we contact the survey respondents. We also expect to have our first local chapter soon and will have a committee reviewing what other ACM or IF.F.gconferences we may wish to become a part of. The first issue of our newsletter was completed about three months late. The organization we were using for good, cheap typesetting suddenly became very busy and took 3 months to

/lp/association-for-computing-machinery/words-from-the-chairman-MortXgKBt7