
ForthOS - standalone operating system written in Forth - zephyrfalcon
http://www.forthos.org/
======
RodgerTheGreat
It's an absolute breeze to boot from the install ISO via QEMU. It boots pretty
much instantaneously, and after that you just need to know Forth:

<http://i.imgur.com/EjbhP.png>

Incidentally, I really like this Forth's version of a locals mechanism:
<http://www.forthos.org/lvars.html>

~~~
FraaJad
can you share the instructions for getting ForthOS on QEMU?

I tried it using Q on MacOSX, and I don't see the last line of output. ie.,
the FORTH prompt.

~~~
RodgerTheGreat
I downloaded Q v0.9.0a89 here: <http://www.kju-app.org/> I ran the app and
created a new VM instance with "operating system" set to "Live CD". Under the
hardware configuration options that are available I set "CD-ROM" to "Choose
DiskImage..." and selected the ForthOS .iso. I also set "Hard Disk" to "New
compressed 100mb diskimage". This step seems to be the key- ForthOS expects
your machine to have a hard drive.

After that just start the machine, select the first option in the boot menu
and you should be gold.

~~~
FraaJad
Thanks!

The bit about Hard disk was helpful. I have the OS working.

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amatus
A previous operating system by Andy Valencia is VSTa
<http://www.vsta.org:8080/>. This has been forked and is called FMI/OS
<http://www.code-unatio.net/wiki/fmios/>.

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me2i81
Back in the day, pretty much all Forth implementations were standalone
operating systems, or at least capable of being run stand-alone. This was one
of its great virtues--you could port it to new hardware in an afternoon. Just
write disk block I/O, console I/O, write the image to disk blocks (or maybe
ROM if you were embedded) and get a boot loader going.

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epo
This is old, the iso was created in '04 and the newsgroup hasn't had a posting
since '06. Is it still active?

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lloeki
Apparently the thing is completely bootstrapped and self-hosting. This, to me
is one of the most impressive features.

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idanb
Congrats, this is really impressive. Hopefully I'll have some free time in the
next few months to try it out. Never used Forth before, so I might give it a
bit of a go sometime soon. Any good further resources other than the wiki
page?

~~~
RodgerTheGreat
GForth, a popular ANS-Forth implementation, has very extensive documentation:
<http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/gforth/Docs-html/>

This particular Forth is based on the eForth dialect. There isn't a ton of
documentation that I'm aware of, but it's almost entirely self-hosted, and if
you can read Forth the source is fairly short and well-commented:
<http://www.baymoon.com/~bimu/forth/>

For a gentle introduction to Forth I recommend Starting Forth
(<http://www.forth.com/starting-forth/>) followed by Thinking Forth
(<http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/>), both by Leo Brodie.

~~~
Wilduck
I'd just like to note how fun the book Starting Forth is. It's a bit like The
Little Lisper in that it's entertaining (there are comics), but thicker, with
a fuller treatment of the material.

~~~
idanb
Thanks guys, great resources! I have a massive flight coming up so I'll have a
chance to get into Forth during that!

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sgt
I can't get the ISO to boot via VirtualBox (on OS X if it matters). Did anyone
else try this? It stops at:

[Multiboot-kludge, loadaddr=0x100000, text-and-data=0x51280, bss=0x0,
entry=0x100044]

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gstamp
Why is it so many forth websites look so... plain?

~~~
0x12
Because they spent more time on the code than they do on the wrappings. Forth
is a really neat, minimalist language, that minimalism is probably a selection
criterion for the way people would look at the websites hosting this stuff.
Likely they see it as just another mass storage device.

Personally I think we could do with a bit more of this and less eye candy,
I've seen tons of really nicely packaged blog posts announcing some project or
other only to see it founder a couple of months, weeks or sometimes even days
later.

I'd much prefer people first building something and announcing it on a
'crappy' web page like this.

~~~
perfunctory
Yes!

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sgt
Great work...

