See
http://www.cpushack.com/2013/02/21/char ... rocessors/
which describes how Harris licensed Moore's Novix CPU chips and put theirs into some hundreds of satellites and space probes, including Messenger which orbits Mercury and Cassini which orbits Saturn.

As it says, nice that a language invented for telescope control has gone out into the Solar system.

via Scot Stevenson

The Forth processors mentioned scream performance, doing more Forth MIPS than MHz, in spite of very simple hardware. It's too bad good ideas don't always become popular. I guess it's too hard for people to believe it's really that good.

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http://WilsonMinesCo.com/ lots of 6502 resources
The "second front page" is http://wilsonminesco.com/links.html .
What's an additional VIA among friends, anyhow?

I would rather believe that it's more a matter of being a large enough departure from existing practice that it doesn't easily get through the "weirdness" filter, similar to APL, Erlang, Haskell, Smalltalk, Lisp... And, in another direction, Quantum Mechanics. Too weird to seriously dig into, unless you're already interested in such things.

It's not so much "too good to believe", but "I'd sprain my brain if I tried to understand that, and nobody really uses it anyway".

Like it.

Actually, it makes sense. Telescopes and space were made for each other. That being the case, Forth would be in the picture(!).

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x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

Thanks for that link. I didn't realize how far out the Novix/RTX chips were being used.

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Because there are never enough Forth implementations: http://www.camelforth.com

When I see neat things like this I always want to get one for myself to play with. A homebrew SBC with a satellite processor would be one of a kind. Here's one on eBay:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/1PC-NEW-HARRIS- ... 1e8795efff

BGA is no fun though and you might have quite a time getting that working...

I have a hunch that's PGA, and not BGA... unfortunate that the seller didn't think to show the bottom of the chip.

Yes, PGA seems likely. While searching for confirmation I found this site/online book all about stack CPUs:
http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/stack ... ec4_5.html