ForthOS Home Page

ForthOS is a complete, standalone operating system for the PC. It includes command line, compiler, debugger, editor, and filesystem. You can give it a test drive by booting the standalone CD (image provided so you can burn your own). If you like it, you can install it onto a disk partition and boot directly from your hard disk.

ForthOS was the basis for the author's own experimental software work; unlike many other Forth systems, this one as a real tool in day-to-day use as a part of a larger development. It is a fully standalone system, with a metacompiler used to generate new versions of ForthOS while running under ForthOS. Please read about its legal status; the short version is that ForthOS is in the public domain.

ForthOS supports:

32-bit addressing
Command line history and editing
Multi-tasking
Pentium-based real time clock
Auto-pause for console output
Block-oriented file I/O
A filesystem which organizes ForthOS blocks
Multiboot/GRUB compliant bootloading
Multiple virtual screens with screen flipping using function keys
IDE
VGA
RS-232 (COM) ports

The original eForth vocabulary
Many additional vocabulary words, mostly standards based
Vocabularies
VOCAB.WORD extension to find WORD in VOCAB regardless of current search order.
Structures and enumerations
A full object oriented extension with classes and inheritance
A variant on local variables (more closely related to a lambda binding) with optional input and output stack format enforcement.
Scoping of identifiers (Local and scrLocal).

vi-like full screen editing with shadows
Debugger
Heap memory allocator
x86 assembler

The current version is ForthOS 1.0. Please read about the installation here.

Alternatively, run it on an emulated PC with the files found here.

Actually, the last great copy of ForthOS development can be found here. There are bootable bits, and also a filesystem with all of the source.

Since viewing the source embedded within a block file seems to stymie many people, I've extracted the source tree into a source viewer. The source viewer lets you flip between the source screen and its shadow comments (if any). You will find the source clumps a bit; remember that the source was accessed and edited in individual 80x25 screens.

For anyone interested, I wrote the script xfs.py to do the extraction.

There are some very old utilities which might help with the block files.

To reach the author, please go here.

A private newsgroup server existed for a while to permit communication among interested ForthOS users; a read-only archive of it is here.

Enjoy!