Collapse OS

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 hsoft@hardcoded.net.

There's also Dusk OS' mailing list

Related efforts

Here is a list of related efforts that I find noteworthy: