One of the first systems that I could actually touch was a 68K/S100 system
back in early '80s; it ran a unix-like OS.  It was made by a Seattle area
company named Empirical Research Group.  The CPU board had Forth in ROM. I
was lucky enough to witness one of the designers perform some serious
diagnostics on other boards in the system using only the CPU/Forth.

I don't think they were the first to come up with this idea.

On Wed, Jun 20, 2018 at 10:39 PM Kurt H Maier <khm@sciops.net> 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 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.  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.
>
> khM
>
>