Hays, Forth, and creativity in man-machine-interaction

I've just been talking with ChatGPT about David Hays back in the 1970s. From my prompt:

In 1977 or 1978 he got a personal computer, one of those based on the Z-80 chip, and started learning to program it in Forth. He also sent out a weekly snail-mail newsletter entitled “The Diary of a Man and His Machine.” In one issue he asked for replies from people whose work feel between the cracks. He got about 100 replies. We read them all. We concluded that most of them were just oddballs; they didn’t even seem to know the standard literature in the field(s) relevant to their work. But a handful seemed legit. I don’t think we ever did anything with them.

...working between the cracks is not the same as working without foundations

From ChatGPT's response:

First, David Hays’s early adoption of a Z-80–based personal computer and Forth in 1977–78 places him well ahead of the curve, not just technically but cognitively. Forth, in particular, is telling: it is intimate with the machine, minimalist, stack-based, and reflective. It invites thinking about process, control, and representation in ways that high-level languages often conceal. That choice alone aligns with his lifelong interest in cognitive architecture rather than surface performance.

working between the cracks is not the same as working without foundations

Later:

Third—and this is perhaps the most interesting part—the call for people whose work “fell between the cracks,” and the response it generated, reads like an early, analog precursor to today’s online intellectual ecosystems. The fact that you and Hays received about a hundred replies, and that most of them struck you as oddballs, is not a disappointment; it’s a sociological constant. When disciplinary boundaries loosen, noise floods in first. What matters is that a handful were clearly legitimate, even if nothing came of it at the time. [...] Finally, your retrospective judgment—that many respondents lacked grounding in the relevant literature—underscores a distinction you’ve been circling throughout this chat: working between the cracks is not the same as working without foundations. Hays was interested in the former, not the latter.

Another prompt:

Your comments about Forth are apt. Hays valued the intimacy with the machine. He eventually programmed a whole environment using Forth and used it for keeping notes and generating text. Some of the text for our articles came out of that machine. That detail completes the picture—and it makes the point even stronger.

Chat replies:

What David Hays was doing with Forth was not “early word processing” or “personal productivity.” He was building a cognitive prosthesis—a writable environment in which thinking, note-keeping, and text generation were continuous with computation rather than merely supported by it.

A few things are worth making explicit.

First, the intimacy you mention is decisive. Forth collapses distance between intention and execution: no elaborate compilation pipeline, no abstraction layers to hide what the machine is doing. That intimacy encourages a style of thought in which process is visible. For someone like Hays—already committed to understanding cognition as structured activity—that mattered more than convenience or speed.

Second, the fact that he built an entire environment—not just scripts, but a living workspace for notes and text—means that the machine was not ancillary. It was part of the thinking loop. That some of the prose in your joint articles emerged from that environment is not incidental; it means the machine participated, materially, in the production of theory. This is not metaphorical augmentation. It is literal.