Re: [9fans] What are you using Plan 9 for?

["Ethan A. Gardener" <eekee57@fastmail.fm>]

On Thu, Jun 21, 2018, at 6:39 AM, Kurt H Maier wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 20, 2018 at 10:35:42PM +0100, Ethan A. Gardener wrote:
> >
> > a sort of operating system where the primary interface to all tasks is
> > a Forth interpreter.
>
> I think we've talked about this in another venue some years back, but I
> often thing of the OpenFirmware implementation used by the OLPC XO-1
> laptop.  Instead of a BIOS or UEFI or linux trash in their stead, the
> system was managed by an OpenFirmware installation, much of which was
> written in Forth, and whose primary interface was a Forth shell.  This
> environment had complete access to the hardware of the system, which
> was used by the project to create really comprehensive hardware
> diagnostics tools.

I do too. My Mac just boots to OpenFirmware now. It's a bit broken, being early Apple OFw, but that was what prompted me to start work -- it needs a text editor. OFw is an ANS Forth, and I'm working with the goal of running on multiple such ANS Forth platforms.

>
> I mostly used it for screwing around, but it was fairly complete; it
> supported the wifi hardware and the webcam, and I often thought I'd like
> a computer that just booted into this environment and stayed there.  I'm
> glad to hear you're still experimenting along these lines.

Thanks!

> There's a
> lot of value in a system whose primary interface is the programming
> environment.  I work with computers because of the Commodore VIC-20...
> and I wonder if I'd have ever given a damn about the field if my first
> exposure to computers involved a Modern User Experience.

I haven't stopped to wonder exactly that, but I think I would have hated them. I was brought up on the idea that computers existed to be programmed, so I wasn't happy when Windows shipped without a programming language outside the DOS prompt, or later at all. I might have gone hunting for "a real computer"! :) It also took me years to get used to the mouse, and longer to get used to menus. It probably didn't help that I didn't have a decent desk for my first Atari ST, and GEM is *terrible!* Anyway, I love this quote:

> Then I discovered girls and cars and didn't get back into computers until the early 90s only to discover that there was no longer a computer that was READY> in 1.2 seconds and would only do exactly what it was told exactly when it was told as fast as it could...Nope, by then the spinning hourglass had been invented and the world has been riveted to their not-as-big-as-a-tv screen, the scowl lines of struggle on their foreheads, one hand tied to a mouse, the other fingers tapping...but conflict obviously was what America needed [...]

It's in the comments here:
https://www.classic-computers.org.nz/collection/atari-400.htm

That 1.2 seconds was the time it took an Atari 400 to check for a disk drive. Windows 7 takes about 50 times as long to 'install' a USB keyboard! It's not even like Atari's peripheral bus was overly simple; it supported almost all peripherals with a common protocol, so I think of it as an early USB.

--
The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne. -- Chaucer