Collapse OS

Bootstrap post-collapse technology

Collapse OS is a Forth operating system and a collection of tools and documentation with a single purpose: preserve the ability to program micro- controllers through civilizational collapse.

It it designed to:

1. Run on minimal and improvised machines.
2. Interface through improvised means (serial, keyboard, display).
3. Edit text files.
4. Compile assembler source files for a wide range of MCUs and CPUs.
5. Read and write from a wide range of storage devices.
6. 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.

Getting started

Usage documentation is in-system, so access to documentation requires you to run Collapse OS. Fortunately, building and running Collapse OS on a POSIX environment is easy.

See /cvm/README.md for instructions.

Then, run 0 LIST for an introduction, follow instructions from there.

Alternatively, there's also Michael Schierl's JS Collapse OS emulator which is awesome and allows you to run Collapse OS from your browser, but it isn't always up to date. The “Javascript Forth” version is especially awesome: it's not a z80 emulator, but a javascript port of Collapse OS!

Organisation of this repository

• blk: Collapse OS filesystem's content. That's actually where Collapse OS’ source code is located. Everything else is peripheral.
• cvm: A C implementation of Collapse OS, allowing it to run natively on any POSIX platform.
• recipes: collection of recipes that assemble Collapse OS on a specific machine.
• tools: Tools for working with Collapse OS from “modern” environments. For example, tools for facilitating data upload to a Collapse OS machine through a serial port.
• emul: Tools for running Collapse OS in an emulated environment.
• tests: Automated test suite for the whole project.

Status

The project unfinished but is progressing well! See Collapse OS’ website for more information.

Looking for the assembler version?

The Forth-based Collapse OS is the second incarnation of the concept. The first one was entirely written in z80 assembly. If you're interested in that incarnation, checkout the z80asm branch.