ForthOS is a complete, standalone operating system for the PC.
It includes command line, compiler, debugger, editor, and filesystem.
You can give it a test drive by booting the standalone CD (image
provided so you can burn your own). If you like it, you can install
it onto a disk partition and boot directly from your hard disk.
ForthOS was the basis for the
author's own experimental software work; unlike many other Forth
systems, this one as a real tool in day-to-day use as a part
of a larger development.
It is a fully standalone
system, with a
metacompiler
used to generate new versions of
ForthOS while running under ForthOS.
Please read about its legal status; the short
version is that ForthOS is in the public domain.
ForthOS supports:
System features:
- 32-bit addressing
- Command line history and editing
- Multi-tasking
- Pentium-based real time clock
- Auto-pause for console output
- Block-oriented file I/O
- A
filesystem which organizes ForthOS blocks
- Multiboot/GRUB compliant bootloading
- Multiple virtual screens with screen flipping using function keys
- IDE
- VGA
- RS-232 (COM) ports
Forth language features:
- The original eForth vocabulary
- Many additional vocabulary words, mostly standards based
- Vocabularies
- VOCAB.WORD extension to find WORD in VOCAB regardless of
current search order.
- Structures and enumerations
- A full
object oriented extension with classes and inheritance
- A variant on local variables
(more closely related to a
lambda binding) with optional input and output stack format
enforcement.
- Scoping of identifiers (Local and scrLocal).
The current version is ForthOS 1.0. Please read about
the installation here.
To reach the author, please go
here.
A private newsgroup server existed for a while
to permit communication among interested ForthOS users;
a read-only archive of it is here.
Enjoy!