FORTH is an early programming language developed by Charles H. Moore in the late 1960s. More developed FORTH on an IBM 1130 minicomputer, which had a 16-bit CPU and only 8 KB of RAM. To keep things simple and reduce memory consumption, he implemented FORTH as a stack-based virtual machine using the Reverse Polish Notation (RPN). But FORTH is much more than just a programming language. Because FORTH has a built-in interpreter, compiler and disk I/O support, a computer running FORTH is also called a “Forth system”. My4TH is such a Forth system. You can develop and debug your Forth programs directly on My4TH. You can enter your source code with the built-in text editor and store it in the on-board EEPROM memory. From there you can compile and run it directly on the My4TH board.
This is well beyond my capabilities, but it seems like an incredibly cool piece of hardware. Niche, sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some of you were into this sort of thing.
The Dragon 64 was a nice 80s FORTH microcomputer.
Forth was found on quite a few micros. However it wasn’t anywhere near as popular as BASIC.
However, Forth was quite well supported across a lot of machines, particularly larger systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware used on PPC mac, IBM power , Sun, and some Arms systems as well as the OLPC XO-1 … has its firmware drivers written in forth. There is support in later versions for drivers written in C also.
Frankly I dunno why modern systems reinvented the wheel with uboot and others…. when OpenFirmware has been a standard since 1994. Including device tree and bytecode built in driver support.
“No one wants to write drivers in Forth” is the reason I usually hear. Hardware init minimalism is also in fashion these days.
I’m sure there are other reasons, like hardware being driven by OS loaded firmware and OS specific drivers in the popular model.
And there is also this, a Jupiter Cantab ACE clone:
https://www.thefuturewas8bit.com/minstrel4d.html
I have the previous version:
https://www.thefuturewas8bit.com/shop/tynemouth-products/minstrel4th.html