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I remember using some Sun workstations in the 1990's. They Open Firmware boot system used Forth. It was also used for PowerPC Macs but I never had any of thos

I remember using some Sun workstations in the 1990's. They Open Firmware boot system used Forth. It was also used for PowerPC Macs but I never had any of those. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware

agumonkey 5y ago
open firmware was still default in mac up until ~2008 (I bought a mac mini to play). I'm not sure it's still there though.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  All Intel Macs use EFI.
eatonphil 5y ago
The FreeBSD bootloader was written in Forth for a while. It looks like they may have transitioned off it to Lua by now. https://marc.info/?l=freebsd-current&m=153469833911665&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=freebsd-current&m=153469833911665&w=2
spijdar 5y ago
Open Firmware is still used by IBM Power servers, although not as the "actual" bare metal firmware[1]. It's instead the default firmware interface for the standardized "VM", PAPR. A cut-down variant called SLOF is shipped with QEMU for this purpose, either for full emulation, or combined with KVM on Power hardware for accelerated virtualization. [1] Technically there's nothing preventing bare metal hardware from implementing PAPR, but to my knowledge, no currently produced hardware does. Same direction that Sun went with their servers late into the game, not long before their acquisition; sun4v ran everything inside LDOMs, with the default configuration giving all resources to a single LDOM, IIRC.
codezero 5y ago
I was playing with my old iBook from around 2000, and I needed to dig into the open firmware commands to set up network booting. Back in 2000 I didn’t know or care about Forth but since the pandemic I’ve gone down a few Forth rabbit holes (thanks CollapseOS!) so it was fun to know what was behind the scenes of the boot interface :)
rbanffy 5y ago
Another famous computer that had it was the OLPC laptop. Lovely machine that deserved more success than it had.

agumonkey 5y ago

open firmware was still default in mac up until ~2008 (I bought a mac mini to play). I'm not sure it's still there though.

rbanffy 5y ago
All Intel Macs use EFI.

eatonphil 5y ago

The FreeBSD bootloader was written in Forth for a while. It looks like they may have transitioned off it to Lua by now. https://marc.info/?l=freebsd-current&m=153469833911665&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=freebsd-current&m=153469833911665&w=2

spijdar 5y ago

Open Firmware is still used by IBM Power servers, although not as the "actual" bare metal firmware[1]. It's instead the default firmware interface for the standardized "VM", PAPR. A cut-down variant called SLOF is shipped with QEMU for this purpose, either for full emulation, or combined with KVM on Power hardware for accelerated virtualization. [1] Technically there's nothing preventing bare metal hardware from implementing PAPR, but to my knowledge, no currently produced hardware does. Same direction that Sun went with their servers late into the game, not long before their acquisition; sun4v ran everything inside LDOMs, with the default configuration giving all resources to a single LDOM, IIRC.

codezero 5y ago

I was playing with my old iBook from around 2000, and I needed to dig into the open firmware commands to set up network booting. Back in 2000 I didn’t know or care about Forth but since the pandemic I’ve gone down a few Forth rabbit holes (thanks CollapseOS!) so it was fun to know what was behind the scenes of the boot interface :)

rbanffy 5y ago

Another famous computer that had it was the OLPC laptop. Lovely machine that deserved more success than it had.