4 ms·

Open Firmware (as shipped on Sun machines and PPC Macs for years) is an operating system written in Forth, too.

lukego 10y ago
OpenFirmware was also the firmware (~BIOS) for the One Laptop Per Child XO. The software was open sourced for OLPC and is online here: https://www.openfirmware.info/Open_Firmware https://www.openfirmware.info/Open_Firmware. This is the same code that was developed at Sun and evolved for Mitch Bradley's projects ever since. (I _think_ that Apple wrote their own interface-compatible implementation mostly in C.) For OpenFirmware is one of the best programs in existence. See also the OLPC Forth Lessons wiki: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Forth_Lessons http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Forth_Lessons
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- davidw 10y ago
  There's even an OpenFirmware song!
tankenmate 10y ago
I remember at uni we used to use the forth boot prompt to hack root on the Sun workstations at uni; you could type it all out on one line. You had to search for the symbol table and then jump through some hoops to find the kernel task list, find the pid of your shell process, edit the user struct and set the effective uid to zero.
abecedarius 10y ago
Yes, and before that there was polyForth. I had a summer job working on it in 1986 -- there were three variants for the PC, to either run under DOS or boot to it directly and use or skip the BIOS. Had preemptive threading with no memory protection, but on the 8086 what can you do? Sometimes we'd run it multi-user, such as for a class, and then any student could crash it, and we'd just reboot. This happened, of course, but surprisingly (looking back) not enough to make a big nuisance. The programming environment on a system like this feels kinda like a cut-down Smalltalk or Lisp, in the sense of a live environment with all the code accessible and tweakable.
- ams6110 10y ago
  There was Forth for the TI99/4a back around then also.
  - abecedarius 10y ago
    Yup! That was actually what I used at home back then-- you too? But Wycove Forth was relatively amateurish and iirc called on built-in ROM routines for OS operations like reading a disk.

OpenFirmware was also the firmware (~BIOS) for the One Laptop Per Child XO. The software was open sourced for OLPC and is online here: https://www.openfirmware.info/Open_Firmware https://www.openfirmware.info/Open_Firmware. This is the same code that was developed at Sun and evolved for Mitch Bradley's projects ever since. (I _think_ that Apple wrote their own interface-compatible implementation mostly in C.) For OpenFirmware is one of the best programs in existence. See also the OLPC Forth Lessons wiki: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Forth_Lessons http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Forth_Lessons

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
davidw 10y ago
There's even an OpenFirmware song!

tankenmate 10y ago

I remember at uni we used to use the forth boot prompt to hack root on the Sun workstations at uni; you could type it all out on one line. You had to search for the symbol table and then jump through some hoops to find the kernel task list, find the pid of your shell process, edit the user struct and set the effective uid to zero.

abecedarius 10y ago

Yes, and before that there was polyForth. I had a summer job working on it in 1986 -- there were three variants for the PC, to either run under DOS or boot to it directly and use or skip the BIOS. Had preemptive threading with no memory protection, but on the 8086 what can you do? Sometimes we'd run it multi-user, such as for a class, and then any student could crash it, and we'd just reboot. This happened, of course, but surprisingly (looking back) not enough to make a big nuisance. The programming environment on a system like this feels kinda like a cut-down Smalltalk or Lisp, in the sense of a live environment with all the code accessible and tweakable.

ams6110 10y ago
There was Forth for the TI99/4a back around then also.
- abecedarius 10y ago
  Yup! That was actually what I used at home back then-- you too? But Wycove Forth was relatively amateurish and iirc called on built-in ROM routines for OS operations like reading a disk.