One of the first systems that I could actually touch was a 68K/S100 system back in early '80s; it ran a unix-like OS. It was made by a Seattle area company named Empirical Research Group. The CPU board had Forth in ROM. I was lucky enough to witness one of the designers perform some serious diagnostics on other boards in the system using only the CPU/Forth.
I don't think they were the first to come up with this idea. On Wed, Jun 20, 2018 at 10:39 PM Kurt H Maier <k...@sciops.net> wrote: > On Wed, Jun 20, 2018 at 10:35:42PM +0100, Ethan A. Gardener wrote: > > > > a sort of operating system where the primary interface to all tasks is > > a Forth interpreter. > > I think we've talked about this in another venue some years back, but I > often thing of the OpenFirmware implementation used by the OLPC XO-1 > laptop. Instead of a BIOS or UEFI or linux trash in their stead, the > system was managed by an OpenFirmware installation, much of which was > written in Forth, and whose primary interface was a Forth shell. This > environment had complete access to the hardware of the system, which > was used by the project to create really comprehensive hardware > diagnostics tools. > > I mostly used it for screwing around, but it was fairly complete; it > supported the wifi hardware and the webcam, and I often thought I'd like > a computer that just booted into this environment and stayed there. I'm > glad to hear you're still experimenting along these lines. There's a > lot of value in a system whose primary interface is the programming > environment. I work with computers because of the Commodore VIC-20... > and I wonder if I'd have ever given a damn about the field if my first > exposure to computers involved a Modern User Experience. > > khM > >
