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seven programming languages on one floppy (Developers)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 28.03.2023, 12:29

> > > I was thinking of having a Youtube channel or similar
> > > showing the construction of the OS from scratch.
> >
> > Good idea.
>
> Ok, if you think that is a good idea, can you elaborate
> on what you'd like to see? I downloaded the Sol-86 you
> referenced and got it to boot (after zapping the last
> 2 bytes of the first sector), but after it said "done"
> it seemed to freeze.
I haven't booted it, only wanted to show an example of Forth as an OS. There are certainly others, e.g. Chuck Moore's colorForth. (In the old days, Forth used raw blocks as files and had a very simple built-in text editor.)

> I thought that was a good idea - it is an independent
> public domain OS as a starting point, and I do have
> real hardware with a BIOS. I was thinking that I want
> to quickly move to real hardware with UEFI though.
> That would be 64-bit, but I was thinking I could
> continue to run 32-bit software under 64-bit UEFI.
> While staying in 64-bit mode. Things like push eax
> would not be available, so I would need to manipulate
> the stack manually.
I think most people consider 32-bit dead. Windows 11 doesn't support 32-bit anymore (as host system, only in userland).

> The desire to switch from the old hardware to the new
> hardware is because it is easier to replace. The new
> computers I have bought in the last couple of years
> don't have BIOS/CSM. Not working, anyway.
Intel killed CSM for whatever reasons. I vaguely suspect it had to do with power management, but it's probably also due to costs or disinterest.

> > There have been various Forth OSes over the years. Take a look at Nils
> > (nmh)'s Sol-86. "Forth" is an OS, a compiler, an interpreter, an editor,
> a
> > debugger, a calculator, etc.
>
> Is there a reason why this is more viable in Forth
> instead of C?
I never learned Forth, but I was always fascinated by it. I'm mostly sympathetic to ISO C but probably prefer Pascal (or derivatives).

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PForth (public domain, written in C)

> > Dumb question from me, but isn't UEFI just a modern DOS?
>
> UEFI has an API very different from MSDOS, so
> it's a bit like saying that Linux is modern DOS.
The BIOS and DOS (which some people call a glorified boot loader) are closely connected in history. UEFI runs PE/EXE atop FAT with GOP (?) for graphics. In other words, the old days of doing diagnostics in DOS are gone because they rewrote it (with networking, Unicode [UTF-16], GUI, new apps, etc). My old 2010 Dell laptop had a diagnostics partition running Dell Real Mode Kernel (DRMK), aka a modified DR-DOS. (Infuriating that it wasn't available for users, but that was probably for "security". In fairness, there's a lot of ransomware these days, ugh.)

Seeing things like POSIX-UEFI makes me think it's yet another mini OS. (Somebody built a UEFI app of Python 2.7, but I can't find it. Probably because 2.x is dead/obsolete.)

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