[TUHS] Porting the SysIII kernel: boot, config & device drivers

[Larry McVoy]

On Sun, Jan 01, 2023 at 12:02:12PM +1100, Rob Pike wrote:
> A theory about organizations, inspired by OpenBoot.
> 
> "I have nothing to do at the moment, why don't I put a FORTH
> interpreter into the boot ROM? And then I'll make it an industry standard.

Yeah, that was Mitch's baby and you have the details as right as I can
remember.

I barfed at Forth, I've coded in Forth and didn't care for it.  I didn't
like lisp either but I could sort of see why some people get all worked
up for lisp, wasn't for me, but I could see the point.  I never saw the
point of Forth for anything.

But, for whatever reason, Mitch did.  Yuck.  The one time it was useful
in my memory, was during bringup and the kernel debugger wasn't working
yet.  So Mitch, or someone, coded up forth code to walk kernel data
structures, a set of a dump_$whatever.  Briefly useful.

Over all, I agree with everything Rob said.