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:

  1. Run on minimal and improvised machines.
  2. Interface through improvised means (serial, keyboard, display).
  3. Edit text and binary contents.
  4. Compile assembler source 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.

Status

The Collapse OS project is completed! It can be downloaded here. Highlights:

Dusk OS

I haven't touched Collapse OS in the last few months because I got sucked up in a new project, Dusk OS, an operating system designed to be maximally useful during what I call the first stage of collapse.

Development has been doing well and the result so far is impressive, so much that I'm thinking making Collapse OS a part of Dusk OS. To be determined.

Getting started

Collapse OS can be downloaded here.

Documentation is in text files in "doc/". Begin with "intro.txt". Alternatively, James Stanley hosts an online Collapse OS documentation browser.

Another interesting alternative for documentation is Michael Schierl's PDF export of it (code that generates it). Unlike James' export, it's not automatically kept up to date, but it's a great way to print the whole thing at once.

You can also try Collapse OS directly on your browser with Michael Schierl's JS Collapse OS emulator which is awesome 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!

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

The best place to discuss the project is on its private mailing list.

Collapse OS was previously hosted on Github and it has a few interesting discussions in its issues.

A lot of questions that you might have may already have been anwered in a big discussion about it occurred on Reddit. I've answered many questions there.

There was also a nice conversation on Hacker News about Collapse OS (and then another one and another one), but I didn't participate because I don't have a HN account. Also, this community doesn't seem collapse-aware (although they did seem to warm up to the idea lately) so the idea of participation into this discussion seemed tedious to me. But the user "yellowapple" did a good job of answering many questions in a way that is similar to what I would have.

Related efforts

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