[TUHS] Re: Question about BSD disklabel history

[Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>]

On Sun, Dec 31, 2023 at 04:46:49PM -0600, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> At 2023-12-31T16:31:00-0500, Clem Cole wrote:
> > Next (ney Apple) started with the Mach code base from CMU.  There was
> > a push in the Valley in those days for something called OpenFirmware
> > [Warner help here -- I think that it was forth based IIRC, and Sun may
> > have had their hand in it also].
> 
> I'm not Warner but I owned and operated a few OpenFirmware based
> machines.
> 
> > But the key is that it ran on 68K's.
> 
> I don't think that's the case.  OpenFirmware (OF) ran on SPARC and
> PowerPC hardware, at least.  And since it was indeed Forth-based, in
> principle it could have been ported practically anywhere (assuming
> memory requirements for OF itself were met).

OpenFirmware is Mitch Bradley's baby.  I believe it ran on 68k Suns, 
there was some sort of boot prom there.  I mostly used it on SPARC.
It was pretty powerful but my personal feeling is the choice of 
Forth didn't help.  Yeah, I get it, Forth is like some weird lisp
and the lisp people love lisp.  What the lisp people don't get is
there are a lot more people who don't love lisp than do love lisp.
And trying to get everyone to love lisp isn't gonna happen.

That said, what else could Mitch have used at the time?  Tcl?
Please, another weird lisp.  Perl?  Not really something that
wants to talk to the bare metal.

It's a serious question, is there anything that Mitch could have
used that would have had wider appeal?

And I agree whole heartedly with the EFI crap being a giant step
backwards.