Bootstrap post-collapse technology
Winter is coming and Collapse OS aims to soften the blow. It is a Forth (why Forth?) operating system and a collection of tools and documentation with a single purpose: preserve the ability to program microcontrollers through civilizational collapse. It is designed to:
- Run on minimal and improvised machines.
- Interface through improvised means (serial, keyboard, display).
- Edit text and binary contents.
- Compile assembler source for a wide range of MCUs and CPUs.
- Read and write from a wide range of storage devices.
- Assemble itself and deploy to another machine.
Additionally, the goal of this project is to be as self-contained as possible. With a copy of this project, a capable and creative person should be able to manage to build and install Collapse OS without external resources (i.e. internet) on a machine of her design, built from scavenged parts with low-tech tools.
Features
- Runs on Z80, 8086, 6809 and 6502 machines with very little resources.
- Can assemble Z80, AVR, 8086, 6809 and 6502 binaries.
- Can disassemble 6502 and 6809.
- Can program AVR microcontrollers.
- Has a command line text editor similar to Forth's traditional editor as well as a visual text editor inspired by UNIX' VI.
- Has a visual binary editor.
- Has the full power of a reasonably well-featured Forth interpreter.
- Can be built from a POSIX environment with minimal tooling: only cc and make are needed.
- Excluding machine-specific ports, less than 2000 lines of code.
Getting Collapse OS
The code of collapse OS is available as a git repo on SourceHut. Refer to instructions in README.
Funding
You are inspired by Collapse OS and would like to fund its development? I don't do any kind of crowdfunding, but if you happen to be a rich philanthropist, maybe we can do something.
Discussion
My name is Virgil Dupras and I can be reached at [email protected].
There's also Dusk OS' mailing list
Related efforts
Here is a list of related efforts that I find noteworthy: