Another presentation to IPRUG

My presentation to IPRUG about the Raspberry Pi a few weeks ago went down well, so when Kerry, the leader of the group, asked if anyone was willing to join in for an evening of five-minute “lightning” talks I thought I’d have another go. This time I put together a slide deck and some chat …

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Memory map thoughts for a bare-metal system

In my continuing research for my bare-metal operating system and language, I have been looking at polyFORTH. This is a system language designed for use on the massively-parallel processor chips produced by GreenArrays, obviously from the same heritage as the Problem Oriented Language philosophy from Charles Moore’s 1970 document. One interesting thing about the polyFORTH …

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Basics of a FORTH style systen

I have been reading about the early days of FORTH recently, and learned a lot about the ideas and philosophy behind the language and the system. In the past, when I had tried to create my own FORTH-style languages I think I was missing something important. I had been confusing the “language” of available FORTH …

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Programming a Problem-Oriented Language

Several Posts ago, during a discussion of why I am interested in bare-metal operating systems development, I linked to Charles Moore’s biography on his ColorForth.com web site. At the time I was interested in looking at a variety of stack-based languages for inspiration, including ColorForth. Sure enough, ColorForth had some interesting ideas, but what stopped …

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Data representation – squashing Morse code

I’ll say at the start that there’s no real reason to do this. The Raspberry Pi has far more memory than any little bare-metal program is ever likely to use. However, this just struck me as a bit of fun, and arguably instructive in thinking about data representations. Last Time I wrote about Charles Moore, …

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Interlude: a bit of history

Bear with me if you are here for insights about Raspberry Pi development. This will all come together eventually. I hope. In the early 1980s I studied Computer Systems Engineering at the University of Warwick. During the second year of the course I shared a student house with three friends and we had all sorts …

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