4 ms·
There’s folklore, I don’t know where I heard it, or if I just made it up, so take it with a grain of salt. But the story is the Chuck Moore, when he wrote Colo
by whartung 3y ago
There’s folklore, I don’t know where I heard it, or if I just made it up, so take it with a grain of salt.
But the story is the Chuck Moore, when he wrote ColorFORTH, essentially started with DOS, DEBUG, and a floppy drive.
And from this sprang forth (ahem) ColorFORTH. Essentially he hand keyed in the most minimal core necessary to start working with his own tools until he had a boot floppy. Then he tossed DOS and DEBUG and off he went.
Appreciate that the original FigForth is about 80 screens of code. And a 3.5” PC floppy can store over 1400 screens.
Chuck seems to be the kind of person that could type in a rough Forth in raw assembly and get it editable a feed on itself to get more powerful.
It’s an interesting thought experiment to be sure.
- emmelaich 3y agoYeh, I think one of the first steps would be to write a tiny lisp or forth. Maybe something like tcl or perl/awk subset. Probably the most bang-for-buck.
- m463 3y agobootstrap, aka becoming sovereign aka self-made man.
- codethief 3y ago> the original FigForth is about 80 screens of code Was "screens" a common unit of code length back in the day? Interesting.
- spogbiper 3y agoOnly in Forth, as far as I know
- whartung 3y agoIndeed. Take a look at the Fig Forth Installation Manual, which has the source code to Fig Forth, in Fig Forth. The source is listed as Forth screens. http://archive.6502.org/books/forth_interest_group/fig_forth_installation.pdf http://archive.6502.org/books/forth_interest_group/fig_forth...
- mftrhu 3y agoIt is forth-specific. It refers to blocks of 1024 bytes of code, arranged in 64 columns by 16 lines and manipulated through a more-or-less standard vocabulary[1], supported by most Forth systems. You can see it in action in e.g. the CollapseOS emulator[2], as it comes preloaded with ~300 blocks: try writing "0 LIST" (uppercase, as it is case-sensitive - see also [3]). [1]: https://forth-standard.org/standard/block/ https://forth-standard.org/standard/block/ [2]: https://schierlm.github.io/CollapseOS-Web-Emulator/ https://schierlm.github.io/CollapseOS-Web-Emulator/ [3]: https://incoherency.co.uk/collapseos/blk.txt.html https://incoherency.co.uk/collapseos/blk.txt.html
- 6c696e7578 3y agoToday I'd still call it screens, as there's a default that xterm uses of 80x24, damn near the 80x25 in DOS years. I suspect xterm used 80x24 as a terminal program would normally use the last line for info, like baud rate. https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/5634 https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/5634