It's rather concise, most functions tend to be a single short line. Its syntax is minimal (or non-existent according to some), it's just flat white-space separated tokens. It has imperative/interactive semantics, in the sense that every successive word makes some changes on the current state (the stack).
All of this makes it quite amenable to be used as an OS shell I think, it seems obvious in retrospect.
The idea of starting with an empty Forth and creating a whole universe of automations and DSLs for your system, one command at a time, is quite pleasing, in a purist sense, although perhaps not entirely practical.
Does such a shell exist? Not as minimal as Ilo, one you can actually use in a modern system instead of bash and the like, ideally with a nice display of the stack. Probably Factor is the most appropriate Forth-like to build it on, it already has a good REPL mode, it would mainly involve adding a bunch of utilities for practical command-line use.
For a reference, the 8088 build needs a bit more than that to account for stacks, the VM code, drivers, and memory needed for the actual hardware. (Around 384KiB physical RAM on an 8088/8086 works well from my testing, but I've tested with 285-320KiB in non-standard configurations under a few emulation targets).
I use RetroForth as a working environment on Unix [mostly OpenBSD & FreeBSD], with an (unreleased) userland written in it, along with some use of external standard utilities. I'm still working on improvements around chaining programs via a pipe-like structure, but it's been my main environment apart from Konilo for a few years now.
I went through a short period of figuring out interesting peek/poke memory addresses for modifying the BASIC system, and found the "80" used as the scroll width. Setting that to 60 allowed me to create a non-scrolling status sidebar like that for my first programs/games.
It strikes me that it would have been great to have had a Forth machine back then. That early version of BASIC didn't have a (language accessible) stack! Not even a return address stack, aka GOSUB. So I used strings as a stack to implement a small text adventure parser. (And later, on a computer with graphics pixels, I used BASIC strings as a heap for defining and drawing simple 3D vector objects.) Then I learned Pascal.
Desperate times. Desperate measures. But Forth would have been great.
https://www.acornelectron.co.uk/info/electron/acornsoft_adde...
I still have mine
IPMI - standard
DRAC - Dell
iLOM - Sun/Oracle
iLO - HP
IMM - IBM(I wonder how they got that acronym)
BMC - vendor neutral
RedFish - Current DMTF standard replacing IPMI
ALOM - sometimes encountered in the wild as part of iLO :O
HMC - IBM on non-x86 systems (except OpenPower), not compatible with anything else
RSA - used to be IBM
IMC - Cisco : OpenFirmwareSong ( - ♬ )
\ By Mitch Bradley.
\ Sung to the tune of "The Flintstones".
𝄞
." Firmware" cr
." Open Firmware" cr
." It's the appropriate technology," cr
." Features" cr
." FCode booting" cr
." Hierarchical DevInfo tree." cr
." Hack Forth" cr
." Using Emacs on the keys," cr
." Save in" cr
." NVRAM if you please." cr
𝄒 cr
." With your" cr
." Open Firmware" cr
." You can fix the bugs in no time" cr
." Bring the kernel up in no time" cr
." We'll have an FCode time!" cr
𝄒 cr
\ Thank you and good night!
reboot
;>You may be amused to know that the firmware has an Easter Egg of the Conway's Life. If you press the rocker pad (left side of screen) to the right after powering on, you will get a randomly-select amusement, one of which is Life. It uses the traditional life-death rule with a wrap-around field, and initial conditions that result in a fairly long number of generations before steady-state. Specificially, the initial state is a glider gun and an R-pentomino. The pentomino evolution eventually wrecks the gun, but things get pretty wild for awhile as gliders wrap around and interact with the debris from the pentomino. It almost stabilizes several times, but then something will set off another burst of activity for awhile before it finally dies out.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21049568
DonHopkins on Sept 23, 2019 | parent | context | favorite | on: OLPC’s $100 laptop was going to change the world (...
That's Mitch Bradley's Open Firmware Forth, which was also on Suns, post-NuBus PowerPC Macs, Pegasos, and IBM Power Systems!
I used to call it "L1-A Forth", because that's the Forth you got when you pressed "L1-A" on a Sun keyboard to get into the boot monitor. He also made a great version of that Forth system with a metacompiler that ran under Unix (Forthmacs), which I used a lot.
https://github.com/MitchBradley
https://github.com/MitchBradley/openfirmware
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware
https://web.archive.org/web/20121119070656/https://elinux.or...
http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?topic=1965.0
https://github.com/ForthHub/ForthFreak/blob/master/Forthmacs
Also:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38689282
>Mitch Bradley came up with a nice way to refactor the Forth compiler/interpreter and control structures, so that you could use them immediately at top level! Traditional FORTHs only let you use IF, DO, WHILE, etc in : definitions, but they work fine at top level in Mitch's Forths (including CForth and Open Firmware).
More about Mitch and OpenFirmware:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29261810
https://web.archive.org/web/20090920123423/http://radian.org...
>And lest you think this is some kind of Apple-paid rant, I'll mention Mitch Bradley. Have you read the story of Mel, the "real" programmer? Mitch is that guy, in 2008. Firmware superhacker, author of the IEEE Open Firmware standard, wrote the firmware that Sun shipped on its machines for a good couple of decades, and in general one of the few people I've ever had the pleasure of working with whose technical competence so inordinately exceeds mine that I feel I wouldn't even know how to start catching up. Mitch's primary laptop runs Windows.
kragen•7h ago
Any idea why crc is specifying a custom BIOS image? QEMU comes with a default one, right? Questions like these make me wish asciinema supported recording voiceovers.
I'm guessing that the slow text screen updates are some kind of an artifact of unoptimized UEFI implementation, and/or QEMU, because I'm pretty sure Konilo is a lot snappier than this running under Linux, even though the Ilo implementation is not a highly optimized virtual machine.
crc_•7h ago
I can say that the display & overall performance is noticeably faster on the two actual computers I tested on than under qemu on my Linux system.
kragen•7h ago
It makes sense that it would default to using SeaBIOS; QEMU has a lot of options whose defaults were more reasonable 20 years ago.
yjftsjthsd-h•5h ago
kragen•5h ago
yjftsjthsd-h•5h ago
kragen•5h ago
I don't think you can make those small tweaks without breaking tens of thousands of users' production setups which depend on those defaults.
pm215•1h ago
The approach the project has settled on is to say that providing user friendly defaults should be the job of a "management layer" piece of software like libvirt, and QEMU proper should concentrate on providing flexible and orthogonal options which that other software can use to tell it what to do.
deivid•7h ago
kragen•5h ago