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.

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

Collapse OS is published as tar bundles and available here. As you can see, it hasn't been updated in a while because its author is having way too much fun working on Dusk OS.

Refer to instructions in the README at the root of those tar bundles.

There has been an effort to include Collapse OS into Dusk itself. That effort is available in a git repo on SourceHut. However, I've walked back from that effort as I think it was a bad idea. Collapse OS and Dusk OS are better as two distinct and separate projects.

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:

• Dusk OS
• Tumble Forth
• Public Domain Books to Restart Computer Technology
• Civboot: a civilizational bootstrapper
• Simplifier
• Sci.Electronics.Repair FAQ
• The Vintage Technology Digital Archive
• A big collection of Apple-related documentation
• Daniel Marks' electronic designs focusing on resilience
• Michael Schierl's UXN port of Collapse OS
• Deadly Optimism, Useful Pessimism