Free BIOS (was Resources for DOS (was: DOS Compatable OS))

Hi Bob, Am 16 Dec 2005 9:26 meinte Robert Armstrong: Shure, but to me it seams dead since quite some time. Well, I'm not a Forth evangelist either, but it got it's mertoots. to adapt it to a new CPU, all you need is to write a rather compact core interpreter and a few low level access routines. Of course it doesn't free you from adding CPU and hardware specific code (in Forth) when using on a new machine, but all Hardware that is already covered can be used right away. Atempts like that has been done several times, and if you own certain IBM or Mac (PPC) or Sparc computers, your machine might already use it. The non-x86 world is always lacking hardware, and adding a bus like PCI does only allow to plug in a card without killing the machine - without drivers it eats capacity of your power supply (in best cenario, in worst, it slows down or blocks the bus by not beeing properly initialized). Here the Open Firmware (IIRC IBM, Motorola, Sun and HP where involved) initiative jumped in, by defining a standard where the machine is supposed to have a forth interpreter in ROM (or wherever the boot and initialize software is) that is used to execute a set of Forth programms to initialize the card. As an extension a set of 'entry points' to do basic I/O funcionality was also defined. The goal was to be able to plug any Open Firmware card into any of the machines and have it properly initialized and recognized by the OS, and in case of certain cards (for exampel graphic) be even used with a basic functionality without loading card specific drivers. At least enough to get the system up and running. I would realy favour the Forth solution over anything else. Na, just the other way arround. Shure, a Linux gets loaded, but this can go straight to boot a Windows, or DOS. Gruss H. -- VCF Europa 7.0 am 29/30.April und 01.Mai 2006 in Muenchen http://www.vcfe.org/