Re: Can you give me suggestions for running Forth as it's own OS on a PC

MarkWills wrote:
On Oct 23, 4:54 am, Abdul Noory <sa...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Can you give me suggestions for running Forth as it's own OS on a PC?

Thanks

I do wonder why the major Forth vendors have not gone down this route
before. If I am not mistaken, PolyForth could run native on some
platforms (e.g. Vax) but I am little surprised there is no
commercially available native Forth based OS for Intel machines.

Actually, thinking about it, I guess it comes down to the millions of
hardware variants that one comes across on PC platforms; graphics
card, network cards, storage devices etc. It would be just too much
work to support everything. I guess it would be much easier for
'closed' platforms such as Macs, Sun, DEC etc, because it is possible
to know the hardware platform intimately, and code against the
hardware directly, whereas that is pretty much impossible for the PC
platform.

So, I retract my original statement! You didn't read nothin',
right? :-)

Per my message above, we have in the past supported fully native implementations on PCs and other (older) machines. The reason that we didn't continue is basically one of market pressure: people who have PCs want to do things with them other than run Forth.

The Forth OS is designed as a dedicated OS to run whatever Forth programs are there, but not independent compilers or object programs prepared elsewhere. This is great for a dedicated machine, but not the way most people want to use their PCs. Theoretically, we could add that capability, with a vast expenditure of effort, but the economic return doesn't justify it, and in the last analysis, if we did everything Windows does, we'd be almost as bad as Windows ;-)

Cheers,
Elizabeth

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